Olympus 35 RD

The thing people buy this camera for is the lens. Olympus put an F.Zuiko 40mm f/1.7 on the front of a body that fits in a coat pocket, and that made it one of the fastest lenses you could get on a fixed-lens rangefinder of its day. Six elements, sharp wide open in a way that still surprises people who shoot it for the first time, and rendering that goes soft and creamy at f/1.7 then snaps to clinical by f/4. That glass is the whole pitch.

Handling is dense in the way only 1970s compacts are. The 35 RD is small but it has weight, a chrome-and-black brick that feels machined rather than molded. The viewfinder is bright with a rangefinder patch in the center, parallax-corrected frame lines, and a meter scale running along the bottom of the frame that shows you the aperture the camera wants to pick. Plenty of owners wish that scale sat off to the right where your eye lands naturally, but it doesn't. Focusing is by the patch alone, fast once your eye learns it and slow in dim light when the patch washes out. Loading is ordinary back-door 35mm. Nothing fiddly.

The meter is the part that splits owners into two camps. It is a CdS cell reading through the front, feeding a shutter-priority auto mode: you set the shutter speed, the camera picks the aperture, and the scale tells you what it chose. That cell needs a battery, and the original mercury cell it was built around is long gone, so most surviving bodies have been adapted to a modern equivalent or just run slightly off. Here is the saving grace that the cheaper Olympus compacts never offered. The 35 RD has a full manual aperture ring, so when the meter is dead, drifting, or fooled by a bright sky, you can ignore it entirely and set both dials by hand. That is when an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app earns its place, giving you a clean exposure to dial in while the aging meter sits the manual frame out entirely.

Speeds run from about half a second up to roughly 1/500 on a leaf shutter, so the click is a soft snick rather than a slap, and there is no mirror to jump. Plenty of people hand-hold this thing at 1/15 and get away with it.

The honest weakness is age, not design. These are fifty-year-old electronics wrapped around a light-dependent resistor, and the meters drift, the wiring corrodes, and a body that has not had a service usually meters a stop hot or refuses auto mode in cold weather. A proper CLA costs real money relative to what the camera sells for. People cross-shop it against the Canonet QL17 GIII, which has a similar fast lens and a louder cult, and against its own smaller sibling the 35 RC. The 35 RD wins on lens speed and the manual override; it loses on the fact that the Canonet got famous first. Buy a clean one with a working meter and a manual ring you can trust, and it stays in the pocket for years.