Rollei SL350

Wind the lever on an SL350 and the whole body answers in your hand. It is dense, the controls are damped, and the focal-plane shutter releases with a flat, controlled report instead of the loose slap you get from cheaper bodies of the period. This was Rollei trying to prove a 35mm SLR could carry the same precision the brand had built into its Rolleiflex twin-lens cameras for decades. They mostly managed it, and then the production line closed after a short run.

The point of the camera was open-aperture metering across glass from more than one maker. The SL350 sits on the Rollei QBM mount, and because Rollei sourced lenses from Zeiss, Schneider, and its own factories, you could meter wide open through fast Planars and Sonnars without stopping down to read the scene. The finder is bright for a mid-1970s SLR, a ground-glass screen with a central focusing aid, and the match-needle CdS meter runs along one edge of the frame. You balance the needle by turning aperture or shutter. It is center-weighted, and it reads accurately when the cell is still healthy. Whether the cell is still healthy is the catch.

CdS cells drift with age, and the meter was built around a now-discontinued mercury battery, so a lot of surviving SL350 bodies meter optimistically or sit dead. The shutter is fully mechanical, running from a long one second up to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60, so the camera shoots perfectly well with no working meter at all. That is where an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app does the work. You place the shadows on the zone you want and ignore whatever the tired needle says. The body never loses anything but its built-in meter, and the app is how you give that back.

Loading is conventional back-door 35mm, nothing clever, which is welcome given how particular the rest of the system can be. The weight and the finish are the reason to want one, and the electronics are the reason to be careful. These bodies are heavy and beautifully made, and they are harder to service than a contemporary Nikon or Pentax because few technicians know the QBM platform anymore. A Spotmatic you can get fixed almost anywhere. An SL350 you box up and mail, then wait.

It occupies an odd corner of the used market now. People do not line it up against the obvious Japanese workhorses. They buy it because they already own QBM Zeiss glass and need a body to mount it on, or because they want a Rollei that aimed at the German precision SLR ideal. The run was brief, so clean bodies are uncommon and ones with a working meter are scarce. A recently serviced example is a genuinely lovely thing to shoot. An untouched one out of a drawer should be treated as a meterless body until proven otherwise. The lenses, though, are worth the trouble on their own.