Minolta Autocord

Everyone wanted a Rolleiflex and most people could not afford one, so they bought this instead and discovered the joke was on Rollei. The Autocord puts a four-element Tessar-type Rokkor taking lens in front of the film, and that lens is the whole argument. Sharp in the center wide open, sharp into the corners by f8, with a rendering that holds its own against the German glass on cameras that cost twice as much. People who have shot both will tell you the Rokkor is at least the equal of a Rolleicord's lens, and some go further than that.

You focus it with the strangest control on any TLR. Instead of a knob on the side, there is a lever sweeping along the bottom of the lens board, under your left hand, and you nudge it left and right. It sounds awkward and it is awkward for about a roll, then it becomes the thing you miss on every other camera. The ground glass is bright enough, the waist-level finder pops up with a flick, and the magnifier swings in for critical focus. Loading is the usual 120 routine of feeding the leader onto the take-up spool and lining the arrows on the backing paper up with the marks in the chamber, and from there the film runs on an autostop mechanism, so you are not squinting at a red window to count frames.

The shutter is a Seikosha or Citizen leaf unit depending on the year, running from a full second up to about 1/500, and because it is a leaf shutter it flash-syncs at every speed, top one included. That last part matters more than it sounds. You can drop a fill flash into a backlit portrait at 1/500 and kill the ambient, something no focal-plane camera of the era could do. If you work that kind of daylight fill, read the ambient with an incident or spot measurement from the Zone Light Meter app, set the lens from that, and the leaf shutter lets you sync the flash at whatever speed the light asks for rather than the one a sync limit forces on you.

The weakness is famous among people who own these, and it is mechanical, but it is not where you would guess. The focusing lever is cast from a brittle pot-metal alloy, a zinc mix that work-hardens and cracks instead of bending. Let the helicoid grease gum up over the decades, then shove a stiff focus, and the lever can snap clean off. A broken focus lever is the classic sign of a neglected Autocord, and it is the first thing to check on any body for sale. Budget a CLA into the purchase price, treat a too-cheap one with suspicion, and never force the focus on a sticky example. The selenium meter on the metered versions, where one is fitted, is almost certainly dead now, which is no loss because it was never the reason to buy this camera.

Today the Autocord is the connoisseur's TLR, the one experienced shooters point a beginner toward when the question is what to buy instead of a Rolleiflex. It costs a fraction of the German bodies and gives up almost nothing in image quality, which is exactly why prices have crept up as the secret got out. Find one that focuses smoothly with the lever intact, feed it 120, and you have a square-format camera that will outshoot its price bracket for as long as that little lever holds.