Voigtlander Perkeo I

Folded, the Perkeo I is barely thicker than a paperback, and then you pull the front standard and it snaps open into a 6x6 negative four times the area of a 35mm frame. That is why people carry one. They are usually carrying it instead of a heavier folder or a TLR, and they keep it because nothing else gives you that much film in that little space.

It is a folder, so know what you are dealing with. There is no rangefinder. You guess the distance or use a separate finder, set it on the lens barrel, and trust the depth of field. That sounds primitive until you do it for a week and stop fussing. The viewfinder is a small reverse-Galilean window, bright enough but tiny, and it shows you roughly what the lens sees and nothing more. Twelve square frames per roll of 120, wound with a knob, with a red window on the back to line up the frame numbers as you advance.

The shutter is a leaf unit in the lens, with speeds from a full second up to about 1/500 at the top, and it fires with a soft click rather than the slap you get from any SLR. Because it is a leaf shutter, flash syncs at every speed, which on a daylight portrait means you can drop the background and still fill a face at 1/500 without the sync ceiling that wrecks focal-plane bodies. The lens is usually a coated Color-Skopar, and it is genuinely sharp once you stop down a little. Build quality is the old Voigtlander standard, tight and machined and still working seventy years later.

The real catch is that scale focusing punishes you at wide apertures and close range. Shoot a portrait wide open and miss the distance by a foot and the eyes go soft. Stop down to f8 and the problem largely disappears, but you have given up the speed. If you want a folder you can focus precisely with the camera at your eye, you are looking at the Perkeo II with its coupled rangefinder, and that is the version people pay extra for.

There is no meter here at all, and there never was. That makes an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app the meter the body never had. Place your shadows where you want them, set the aperture and the leaf-shutter speed by hand, and the folder does the rest.

Today the Perkeo I trades cheap relative to its rangefinder sibling, which is exactly why it is a smart buy. You cross-shop it against a Nettar or a cheaper Bessa folder, and the Voigtlander glass usually wins. Watch for fogged finders, stiff struts, and the bellows. Hold it up to a bright light and look for pinholes before you pay. A clean one is a full medium-format camera that vanishes into a jacket pocket, and clean ones are not easy to find.