Rollei Rollei 16S

Slide the front cover open and the camera pops apart in your palm, ready to shoot. Push it closed and the film advances. No winding lever, no thumb crank. You shoot by opening and closing the body, which is faster than it has any right to be once your hands learn the rhythm, faster than any 35mm you own.

This is a 16mm subminiature, smaller than a pack of cigarettes, built in Germany between 1965 and 1972. The lens is fixed, a 25mm f/2.8 Carl Zeiss Tessar that resolves far more detail than the tiny negative can really hold. And it does focus, despite the size. A small geared wheel drives front-cell focusing down to about 40cm, set by scale off the barrel. There is no rangefinder patch and no ground glass, so you read the distance and dial it, which sounds primitive but goes quickly once you trust the markings. The finder is a plain bright-line window, just enough to frame and nothing more. Hold it to your eye and you are mostly composing by instinct.

The shutter is a leaf type running from a slow half-second up to about 1/500, and because it sits in the lens it flash-syncs at every speed. You can drop a fill flash into harsh midday sun and shoot it at the top speed without the partial-frame banding a focal-plane camera would give you. The built-in selenium meter needs no battery, but selenium cells age and most surviving 16S meters now read low or read nothing at all. For a daylight-fill shot, an incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs cleanly with that all-speed leaf sync, and it covers you when the onboard cell has gone soft.

What you are buying into is the strangest corner of the Rollei catalog. The 16 and 16S were premium subminiatures, competing in the same connoisseur niche as Minox and the Minolta 16 line, a serious optical instrument shrunk to something you could palm at a dinner party. The film comes in proprietary 16mm cartridges, which is the honest weakness here. Loading is fiddly, and feeding these cameras in 2026 means respooling 16mm stock yourself or buying from the handful of small outfits who still cut it. There is no off-the-shelf cartridge waiting at the drugstore, and there has not been for decades.

People who shoot it now are collectors and miniature-format obsessives, the same crowd who keep Minox and Minolta 16 cameras alive. Cross-shop it against those and the Rollei wins on lens quality and loses on convenience. It is a beautiful object to hold, genuinely pocketable in a way no half-frame ever managed, and the Tessar pulls detail the negative size has no business showing. Go in expecting the meter to be a relic and the film to be a small project rather than a quick errand. The optics and the novelty are the reasons to carry one, not daily reliability.