Minolta Hi-Matic 9

A 45mm Rokkor f/1.7 on a fixed-lens rangefinder from 1966, bright enough to shoot a dim cafe handheld. That lens is the whole reason the Hi-Matic 9 exists. Minolta put the good glass on a consumer body, and the speed is what people came for then and what they come for now. A fast f/1.7 put it at the front of the pack, level with the quickest fixed-lens rangefinders of the day and well ahead of the f/2.8 crowd.

It runs shutter-priority automatic. Pick the shutter speed and the camera sets the aperture for you; just focus and shoot. Drop out of auto and it becomes a match-needle manual camera: a needle in the finder shows what the cell reads, and you turn the shutter and aperture rings by hand until you have set the pair you want against that needle, placing both shutter and aperture yourself. The meter cell sits in a ring around the front of the lens, so it reads through whatever filter you screw on. The finder is decent for the class, a bright coincident-image patch floating in the middle with parallax-corrected frame lines, and you focus it fast once your eye learns where the patch lives. Not a Leica finder, but good enough to nail focus on a moving subject in the street.

The shutter is a leaf, buried in the lens, and it makes almost no sound. A soft click, no mirror, nothing to announce you. The leaf also means flash syncs at every speed, all the way to the top near 1/500, so you can drop fill into a bright afternoon portrait without dragging the shutter down to 1/60 the way an SLR forces you. Meter the daylight with the Zone Light Meter app, set the flash for the shadows, and the leaf handles the rest at whatever speed you picked.

The honest weakness is age, not the build. This is a heavy chunk of brass and glass, denser than the size suggests, and that part is fine. The trouble is the years. The original meter ran on a mercury cell you cannot buy anymore, so the readings drift unless someone has recalibrated the body for a modern battery, and plenty of these have a meter that no longer tells the truth. The CdS meter circuit was never the most robust part of the camera, and decades on the cell can drift or fog. Light seals rot too, and a proper CLA costs more than the camera does on a good day.

Cross-shop it against the Canonet QL17 and the Yashica Electro 35, the two compacts every buyer weighs against it. The Canonet is smaller and the cult favorite. The Yashica is cheaper and aperture priority. All three carry a fast f/1.7-class lens, so the Hi-Matic does not win on speed alone; it wins on costing less, because the name carries less cachet than the Canonet. Buy one with a known-good meter, or buy one cheap and shoot it fully manual on the match needle. Either way, that f/1.7 Rokkor earns its keep.