Rollei Rolleiflex SLX

In 1976 Hasselblad owned the 6x6 studio and Rollei walked in with a different idea about how a square camera should work. The Hasselblad 500 series was all mechanical, gorgeous, and you cocked it by hand and metered with a clip-on prism if you bothered at all. The Rolleiflex SLX answered with a motor built into the body, electronically controlled shutter speeds, and a battery doing the work a thumb used to do. Rollei bet that the next studio camera would be electronic, and they shipped that bet early.

What you notice first is that there is no film crank and no separate winder to bolt on. The SLX advances film with its own motor, which felt radical on a medium-format SLR of the period. The shutter lives in the lens, an electronically timed leaf shutter that runs out to long exposures on one end and tops out near 1/500 on the other, and because it is a leaf shutter it flash-syncs at every single speed. That is the whole reason studio shooters cared. You can drag a slow ambient exposure or knock down the sun at 1/500 with strobe and the timing never breaks.

The lenses are what kept people in. The SLX shipped with Carl Zeiss glass, the Planar, Distagon, Sonnar, and Tele-Tessar, and the body anchored what grew into the Rollei 6000 system. Schneider-Kreuznach came along later as a second supplier on the 6008-era bodies, not on this one. You focus on a big bright ground glass through a waist-level finder, the square composing the way square does. Build is heavy and dense. This is not a camera you forget you are carrying.

Now the honest part. The early SLX electronics are the weak spot, and everyone who shoots one knows it. The original NiCad battery pack lives inside the body and those cells are long dead; getting a clean rebuild or a modern conversion is the price of entry, and a flaky electronics board can sideline the whole camera. People cross-shopped it against the Hasselblad precisely here, because the Hasselblad fails gracefully and the SLX fails hard. When the power management quits, you are holding a brick until a technician opens it up.

The SLX did carry a built-in meter, a through-the-lens center-weighted reading off three silicon cells behind the mirror, driving shutter-priority auto exposure or full manual. Later 6000-series bodies extended that, off-the-film TTL flash on the 6006 and aperture-priority, program, and a switchable spot pattern on the 6008. On this body you set the leaf shutter and aperture and let the center-weighted cell guide you, or you work fully manual. Either way, take an incident or spot reading with the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows where you actually want them, and that reading pairs cleanly with the every-speed sync when you are mixing strobe and daylight.

Today the SLX sells cheap for what it is, often well under a later 6008, because buyers are nervous about the electronics and the dead battery pack. That nervousness is exactly where the value hides. A serviced SLX with a converted power source gives you Zeiss 6x6 glass, motorized advance, and full-sync leaf shutters for a fraction of a clean Hasselblad kit. Buy one that already works, or buy one cheap and budget for the service you know is coming.