Rollei B 35

Put a Minox 35 next to a Rollei B 35 and the Minox wins on size and loses on build. The Minox is plastic. The B 35 is a chunk of metal that fits in a coat pocket and feels three times its weight when you pick it up, the kind of density that makes people who handle one for the first time say something out loud. People cross-shopped those two for years, and the ones who cared about a body surviving a few decades of pockets and glove boxes went home with the Rollei.

This is the budget rung of the Rollei 35 family. The flagship 35 and 35 S came with a Tessar or a Sonnar; the B 35 (sometimes badged Rollei 35 B) drops to a three-element Triotar and swaps the CdS meter of the pricier models for a simpler selenium cell. That meter is a match-needle readout, simple and uncoupled, so you read it and then dial aperture and shutter onto the lens yourself. The nice part is it needs no battery at all, since a selenium cell makes its own current from light. The catch on a body this age is that selenium fades. Plenty of B 35s now read a stop off or sit dead, and there is no battery to swap that would bring a tired cell back to life. When the meter is out of the picture, an incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app sets your exposure and you turn the rings to match.

Using it is a small ritual. No rangefinder, no reflex finder, so you focus by reading distance and turning the lens to a number, zone focusing the way press shooters worked a wide lens for decades. The viewfinder is a plain bright-line window with nothing coupled to it. The lens collapses into the body to make it pocketable, and you have to pull it out and lock it before the shutter will fire, which trips up every new owner at least once. Film loads from the bottom, which is fiddly, and the wind lever is short and built for the camera's tiny footprint rather than your thumb.

The leaf shutter sits in the lens and tops out near 1/300, modest by SLR standards, but it syncs flash at every speed. Daylight fill becomes trivial in a way it never is on a focal-plane camera capped at 1/60 sync. Read the scene, set your fill ratio, and the leaf shutter goes along with whatever speed you picked. A daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs naturally with that flexibility.

The honest weakness is the meter, and it is the reason to shop carefully. A selenium cell that has drifted or died with age can leave you carrying a meterless camera whether you planned to or not. The Triotar is the other soft spot of the family; corners go mushy wide open and it never has the bite of the Tessar version. If you want the good glass, save for a 35 S.

The reason to buy this one is simple. The full Rollei 35 has crept into collector pricing, while the B 35 gives you the same pocketable metal body for street and travel work where you were going to zone focus anyway. Find one with a working meter if you can, and know that the app covers you the day it goes.