Voigtlander Bessa R2A

For about thirty years the only way to buy a brand-new camera that took Leica M lenses was to buy a Leica, and that meant spending two or three thousand dollars on a body. Cosina broke that. The Japanese factory had licensed the dormant Voigtlander name in 1999, and in 2004 it shipped the Bessa R2A, a new-production M-mount rangefinder with a built-in meter and aperture-priority automation, for a fraction of what a used M6 cost. For a generation of shooters who wanted into the M system without remortgaging anything, this was the door.

Use it and the Cosina engineering shows in good ways. The body is light, mostly metal over a cast chassis, smaller in the hand than a Leica and noticeably less dense, which some people read as cheap and others read as a relief on a long day. The finder runs around 0.7 magnification, bright and contrasty, with a clean rangefinder patch and parallax-corrected frame lines for 35, 50, 75, and 90. Focusing is quick and the patch has real bite. The shutter is a vertical-travel focal-plane unit, electronically timed, one second up to about 1/2000, and it is louder than a Leica cloth shutter. Not loud, but you hear a definite metallic clack rather than a whisper. Flash sync sits at 1/120, high for a focal-plane body, which is genuinely handy for daylight fill.

The "A" in the name is the point. This is the aperture-priority version. You set the f-stop, the camera picks the shutter speed, and a column of LEDs down the right side of the finder shows you what it chose. The meter is center-weighted off the shutter curtain. It works well in even light and gives you the speed without taking your eye off the patch. The flip side is total battery dependence: two small cells run the whole shutter, and when they die the camera stops cold, full stop. There is no mechanical backup speed. That is the R2M's trick, the all-mechanical sibling in the same line, not this one. Carry spares, the way you would with any electronic body.

Center-weighted metering does what center-weighted metering always does, which is get fooled by hard light. Point it into a backlit doorway or a stage washed by one source and the camera averages the bright field and stops down, sinking your subject into shadow. That is the moment to stop trusting the body. Take an incident or spot reading off the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone you want the shadows to sit on, switch the dial off A to that manual speed, and shoot it placed instead of guessed. The R2A gives you the manual override to honor a real reading, which is exactly what aperture-priority auto cannot do on its own.

The honest weakness, beyond the battery thing, is the rangefinder base. It is shorter than a Leica's, so focusing very fast lenses wide open, a 50mm f/1.1 or a 75mm at f/1.5, is less certain than on an M body, and the patch can wash out in bright backlight. People cross-shop it against the Zeiss Ikon ZM, which has a longer base and a smoother feel for more money, and against a used Leica M6 for shooters who want all-mechanical and a brand name. The Bessa stays the value pick. It is the camera that put M glass on a working photographer's budget, and a clean one is still one of the cheapest ways into the system today.