Voigtlander Perkeo II

Fold it shut and the Perkeo II disappears into a jacket pocket. A 6x6 negative, twelve frames a roll, and the whole thing collapses to something barely thicker than a paperback. Pull the catch and the bellows snaps the lens forward on a self-erecting strut, locked and ready, and you are holding a medium-format camera that weighs less than a lot of 35mm SLRs.

You put up with the rest of it for that negative. Twelve square frames on 120, each one roughly four times the area of a 35mm shot, and the Color-Skopar up front is a sharp little Tessar-type lens that holds its own stopped down to f/8 or f/11. The leaf shutter sits in the lens and runs from a full second to about 1/500, and it makes almost no noise, a soft click instead of the slap you get from a reflex body. Voigtlander built the II between roughly 1952 and 1955 as the upgrade over the original Perkeo. It is scale-focus only. You set distance by the engraved scale on the front element and zone-focus by guessing, or by sliding a clip-on accessory rangefinder into the shoe if you want the help.

Handling is where the folder shows its age. The viewfinder is a small bright-frame reverse-Galilean window, clear enough but tiny, and there is no focusing patch in it because there is nothing to couple to. The good news is the part that actually sets the II apart from the Perkeo I. Every Perkeo II has automatic frame counting and a double-exposure interlock. You use the red window on the back only once, to line up the first frame as you load, and after that the body counts and spaces frames for you and blocks an unwound double exposure. No squinting at numbers through a window all roll. As for metering, the camera has none. It never carried a meter of any kind, which was normal for the era.

That last point is easy to work around. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app gives you the exposure the body never had, and because the shutter is a leaf design that flash-syncs at every speed, a daylight-fill reading pairs cleanly with that sync flexibility. You can balance a 1/250 fill flash against a bright sky without hunting for a sync speed, which is something a focal-plane camera will not let you do.

The honest weakness is the bellows. These are seventy years old, and pinhole leaks in the folds are the single most common problem with any Perkeo you find for sale. Hold the open camera up to a bright bulb in a dark room and look for stars of light coming through. Light seals and the leaf shutter can both want service, and a proper CLA on a fixed-lens folder is not cheap relative to what the camera costs.

Today the Perkeo II is the folder people reach for when they want medium-format quality without lugging a TLR or a Hasselblad. It cross-shops against the Zeiss Ikonta and the Agfa Isolette, and it usually wins on size and lens. Buy a clean one, check the bellows, and you have the lightest 6x6 camera that takes a genuinely good picture.