Rollei 35SE

You are standing in a crowd, the strap looped twice around your wrist, and the whole camera disappears into a closed fist. Very few full-frame 35mm bodies pack down this small. A real Sonnar-type lens that rides in a coat pocket all day and weighs less than the meter you would otherwise hang around your neck. The 35SE is the late version of that idea, made at the tail end of the run from 1979 to 1981, with the meter readout changed from a swinging needle to a row of LEDs in the finder.

It is a scale-focus camera, so set that expectation first. There is no rangefinder patch, no split prism, nothing to line up. You estimate the distance, turn the focus ring on the front to the marked feet or meters, and trust the depth of field. At f/8 and a few meters that is fine and fast. Wide open at f/2.8 on a portrait it is a gamble, and people who came from an SLR find that the hardest thing to accept. The finder itself is small and bright with simple frame lines, fine for composing, useless for focusing.

The controls are the famous oddity. Shutter speed and aperture both live on little dials on the front face, flanking the lens, and the exposure readout is three LEDs (over, under, correct) that you balance by eye. The lens collapses into the body with a push and a twist, which is how Rollei got it so flat, and you cannot fire it until you pull the lens back out. The leaf shutter runs from a long 2 seconds up to about 1/500, and because it is a leaf shutter it flash-syncs at every speed, top to bottom.

That sync is the practical gift. A daylight fill-flash reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs perfectly with a body that will sync at 1/500 in bright sun, so you can drop a small flash into a backlit street portrait at noon and not fight a 1/60 sync ceiling the way you would on an SLR.

The honest weakness, beyond the guess-focus, is the meter and its cell. These bodies take a PX-27 type cell and have internal voltage regulation, so the catch is not a dead battery format but age: the CdS reading drifts as the cell ages and the meter falls out of calibration. Many shooters now just ignore the built-in meter and meter externally. The other catch is repair. The dense little mechanism is a watchmaker's job, and a proper CLA costs real money relative to what the camera sells for.

People still hunt these down because nothing else does the job. Street shooters who want zero presence, travelers who refuse to carry a bag, anyone who has been burned lugging a Leica through an airport. It cross-shops against the Olympus XA and the Minox 35, and the Rollei wins on lens character and metal heft while losing on the convenience of rangefinder or aperture-priority focus. Give it a week and the front dials and the distance-guessing stop feeling like obstacles. What comes out the other end are negatives sharp enough to embarrass cameras three times its size.