Voigtlander Bessamatic CS

Set a Bessamatic CS next to the camera most buyers chose instead, a Contaflex from Zeiss Ikon, and you can see the bet the German camera trade was making in the 1960s. Both were leaf-shutter SLRs. Both wanted the precision of a between-the-lens shutter married to reflex viewing. The Bessamatic was Voigtlander's swing at that idea, and the CS was the late, refined version, built right at the end of the run from 1967 to 1969 before the whole approach got swept aside by focal-plane bodies with cheaper interchangeable lenses.

The first thing you notice picking one up is the weight. This is a dense chrome-and-glass object, machined to the standard Voigtlander held before the Zeiss merger swallowed the brand. The CS carries a CdS meter, the upgrade over the earlier selenium-cell Bessamatics, and it is a TTL cell read through a match-needle display: line up the needle, set your aperture and speed, done. The viewfinder is a ground-glass screen with a central focusing aid. Bright enough in daylight, noticeably dimmer once the light drops, which is the usual tax on a leaf-shutter SLR because the mirror and aperture machinery eat into what reaches your eye.

The lens system is the catch. The Bessamatic uses the Voigtlander DKL mount, a between-lens leaf-shutter bayonet shared with other Deckel-shutter SLRs such as the Kodak Retina Reflex, but not freely interchangeable across the whole field. The glass is excellent. Septon, Skopar, Color-Skopar, all sharp, and the famous Zoomar 36 to 82mm zoom built for the Bessamatic system was one of the earliest zooms anyone offered for a 35mm SLR. The lens family is small and finite, though, so what you can mount is fixed once you commit.

The leaf shutter is the reason to bother. It runs from a full second up to about 1/500, and because the blades sit inside the lens, flash syncs at every speed. You can drop in a fill flash near 1/500 against a bright sky, something a focal-plane SLR of the era simply could not do at its much slower sync speed. For daylight portrait work that flexibility still matters, and it is where a daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs cleanly with the sync: meter the scene, balance the flash, and the leaf shutter lets you set any speed you like.

The honest weakness is the meter. CdS cells of this vintage drift, and the original mercury battery the circuit was designed around is long gone, so even a working cell often reads off. Plenty of these bodies have a meter that is simply dead. Repair is real work too, because the leaf-shutter-plus-reflex mechanism is intricate and few technicians still service it. People buy a Bessamatic CS today for the build, the glass, and the all-speed sync, not as a daily shooter. If you want the leaf-shutter SLR experience, the Contaflex is the obvious rival to weigh against it. What tips the decision toward the Voigtlander is usually the lenses.