Rollei 35

Heinz Waaske had the design in a drawer before Rollei ever saw it. He sketched the smallest full-frame 35mm camera anyone had built, took it to his employer Wirgin, got turned down when the company folded its camera plans, and walked it over to Rollei, who put it on the market in 1966. That was the whole point of the thing: a real 24x36 negative out of a body that fits a coat pocket, at a moment when "compact" still meant something the size of a paperback. It was the smallest full-frame 35mm anyone was making in 1966 short of going half-frame.

Holding one for the first time is a small shock. It is dense, all metal, heavier than its size promises, and the lens lives in a tube you pull out and twist to lock before you can shoot. The standard model carries a 40mm f/3.5 Tessar, single-coated, that is biting sharp by f/8 and a little soft in the corners wide open. The hot-shoe sits on the bottom plate, which throws everyone the first day. And there is no rangefinder. None. You set distance by the scale on the barrel and trust depth of field, which is exactly why people who shoot one well leave it parked at three meters and f/8 and only fiddle when they have the time. Zone-focus a busy sidewalk with this and you understand the cult.

The meter is the part that has not aged. A CdS cell drives a match-needle readout in the top deck, center-weighted, and on a camera now well over fifty years old it is often unreliable or dead outright, in large part because it wants a mercury battery that no longer exists. Plenty of owners stopped trusting it long ago. The shutter is the better news. It is a leaf shutter built into the lens, running from a couple of seconds up to about 1/500, and because it is a leaf shutter it syncs flash at every speed, all the way to the top. That matters outdoors. A daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs with that sync flexibility, so you can balance a flash against a bright sky at 1/500 instead of being capped near 1/60 the way a focal-plane camera leaves you, and it doubles as the meter the body never reliably had.

Who carries one today: travelers, street shooters, anyone who wants a serious negative without a bag. It gets cross-shopped against the Olympus XA, which has the rangefinder this camera lacks, and against the later 35S with its faster five-element Sonnar. The honest weakness is that scale focus, full stop. Miss the guess wide open at close range and the frame is mush, and the viewfinder tells you nothing about it. Prices have climbed on these anyway, because the trade is worth it to the people who make it. Few cameras this small ask so much discipline and pay it back so directly.