Rollei Rollei 16

Close your fist around a Rollei 16 and it vanishes. This is a subminiature, shooting 16mm film, dense little brick of metal that weighs more than its size promises. Rollei built it in the early to mid sixties, and the lineage shows the second you handle one. The people who made the twin-lens Rolleiflex made this, and it feels like it. Compared to a Minox of the same years it is a chunkier, more mechanical thing, and that comparison is the one collectors still make.

You work it with both thumbs. The body runs on a push-pull action: slide it open and it cocks the shutter and advances the frame, slide it shut between shots. No rangefinder patch and no ground glass, so you set the focus zone by hand and lean on the depth of field a tiny negative hands you for nothing. The leaf shutter covers 1/2 up to 1/500, plus a B setting, and because it is a leaf shutter it barely makes a sound, a soft click nobody across a table will catch. It also means flash syncs at every speed. The finder is a plain bright-line window, accurate enough for a format this forgiving. The lens is a genuine Carl Zeiss Tessar 25mm f/2.8, sharp once you stop it down a touch.

The 16mm frame is both the appeal and the catch. A negative barely larger than a fingernail means grain shows up early and you are not enlarging these much past a postcard. That was never the point. The point was carrying real glass everywhere, all the time, and on that score it holds up. Loaded with fresh film it still lays down a clean, sharp little frame.

Here is the honest weakness, and it is a big one. The Rollei 16 leans on a selenium meter to guide exposure. The cell reads the light and gives you a reading, and you set shutter speed and aperture by hand to suit it. Selenium dies, though. Sixty years on most cells read low, read erratic, or read nothing, and there is no modern replacement to drop in. A dead cell does not cripple the camera; it only takes away the meter readout, and you still set shutter and aperture yourself across the full range.

This is where an incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app saves the body. With a dead cell you have lost the camera's built-in light reading entirely. Read the light in the app, then set the shutter speed and aperture the reading calls for on the body by hand. It is clumsy compared to glancing at a live needle the way this thing shipped, but it gets you a correct exposure out of a camera whose own meter has gone dark.

Today the Rollei 16 lives in collector territory more than working territory, cross-shopped against the Minox B and the Rollei 16S that came after. It is not cheap for what it does, and 16mm film is a specialty order now, often slit down from larger stock by hand. But there is a small, stubborn crowd who love a precision object, and for them a working one with a sound exposure plan is still a pleasure to carry.