Voigtlander Perkeo E

A 6x6 camera that folds flat enough to slide into a coat pocket has no business also carrying a coupled rangefinder, and yet the Perkeo E does exactly that. The whole point of the Perkeo line was size. Voigtlander built a square-format folder that collapses to maybe an inch and a half thick, and the E is the one that finally let you focus it properly instead of guessing the distance off a scale.

What sets it apart is the focusing. The E adds a coupled rangefinder to the pocketable Perkeo body instead of leaving you with scale focus. Open the bed and the lens springs out on its struts, locked rigid. The rangefinder is usable in daylight, and it makes the difference between a frame that snaps and one that is soft at the edges. The finder itself is small and squinty by modern standards, a tight little window you have to press your eye against.

The shutter is a leaf unit in the lens, running from a full second up to about 1/250, and because it is a leaf shutter it syncs flash at every speed. That matters more than it sounds. You can shoot fill flash at 1/250 in bright sun, something a focal-plane camera at this price cannot touch. Cock it, fire it, and you get a soft mechanical click instead of a slap. There is no mirror in here, nothing to jolt the body, so handheld shots stay sharp down to slow speeds if your hands are steady.

No meter, none at all. The Perkeo E came from an era when you read the light yourself and set the dials by hand, and most surviving bodies have never had a cell to die because there never was one. A handheld or app reading supplies the exposure the body never provided. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app does the whole job here: read the scene, place your shadows, transfer aperture and speed to the lens, and the folder does the rest.

Film loading is the usual 120 ritual, red window on the back to count frames, and the body is dense for its size. All brass and steel under the covering. The honest weakness is the folder itself. The bellows can develop pinholes with age, the struts can go slightly out of alignment and throw off film flatness, and a rangefinder that has drifted needs a careful adjustment that not every repair shop wants to attempt. Check the bellows against a bright light before you trust any Perkeo.

People cross-shop these against the Agfa Isolette and the bigger Zeiss folders, and the Perkeo wins on pocketability and loses a little on finder brightness. Today it sits in the affordable medium-format-folder class, the kind of camera you buy when you want square negatives without hauling a TLR around your neck. Shooters who want a pocketable 6x6 and do not mind metering by hand still seek it out, and the slow, deliberate pace it demands is part of the appeal.