Rollei Rolleimagic II

Put a Rolleiflex Automat next to a Rolleimagic II and the difference in ambition is obvious. The Automat hands you a Compur shutter and full manual control. The Rolleimagic took most of that away and bet that a selenium meter could set your exposure for you. For a stretch in the 1960s Rollei pushed automation hard on the TLR line, and the Rolleimagic is what that gamble looked like in metal. The market never fully agreed, which is exactly why this body now sells cheap next to its famous siblings.

What you actually get is a 6x6 twin-lens reflex with the familiar Rollei body shape, a waist-level hood, and a plain ground glass screen to nail focus. The bright thing here is the viewing screen, a big square you look down into with the world flipped left to right, which trips up everyone the first hour and then becomes second nature. The leaf shutter runs from a full second up to 1/500 plus Bulb, so you are not locked out of slow exposures. It goes off with that soft Rollei click rather than the slap of an SLR mirror. You load 120 across the back, thread the paper to the arrow, and the body counts frames for you.

The whole story is the large selenium cell sitting on top of the camera, above the viewing lens, feeding a needle you read on the top deck. The Rolleimagic II runs a shutter-priority style automation where you pick a speed and the meter swings the aperture, and unlike the original Rolleimagic it lets you override into full manual when the meter lies to you. The first version locked you into automation, and when the cell aged it became a paperweight. The II at least gives you a way out.

Which brings up the honest weakness, and it is a big one. Selenium cells die. They are not battery dependent; they generate their own current from light, and that is exactly the problem, because sixty years of light has drained most of them to nothing or left them reading two stops off. A Rolleimagic II with a dead cell is a manual camera with a needle that does not move, and there is no cheap fix. You are not recelling a selenium meter for pocket change. This is where a Zone Light Meter incident reading does the work the old cell no longer can. The leaf shutter flash-syncs at every speed, so a daylight-fill reading from the app pairs with that sync flexibility, and you set the aperture by hand and ignore the dead needle entirely.

Today this is the cheap way into Rollei 6x6. People cross-shop it against a beat-up Rolleiflex T or a Yashica Mat, and the Yashica usually wins on price-to-reliability because its meter, when present, is easier to live without. Buy the Rolleimagic II for the taking lens and the build, treat the meter as a bonus that probably does not work, and meter the scene yourself. Do that and it rewards you. Trust the needle blind and it will burn a roll.