Voigtlander Superb

Voigtlander built the Superb in 1933 because Franke and Heidecke had just changed the rules. The Rolleiflex had turned the twin-lens reflex into the serious medium-format camera, and every German maker needed an answer. The Superb was Voigtlander's, and they did not just copy the formula. They added a few odd ideas nobody else bothered with, and those quirks are why collectors and users still chase this body down.

The first thing you notice is the nameplate, mounted at a slant. That tilt is not styling. It is so the engraving reads upright when you are bent over the waist-level finder looking down at the camera. The second oddity is the parallax correction. As you focus closer, the viewing lens up top tilts slightly downward so the framing on the ground glass tracks what the taking lens actually sees. It is a clever fix for the classic TLR problem of the top lens framing a touch higher than the bottom one, and Voigtlander built it into the focusing mechanism instead of leaving you to guess. On the screen you compose a 6x6 square on 120 roll film. The finder is prewar dim by modern standards, so you shoot it in decent light or carry a loupe.

The shutter is a leaf inside the lens, running from a full second down to about 1/250. No mirror, so no slap and no blackout. That leaf design has one practical gift: it flash-syncs at every speed, top to bottom. If you shoot daylight fill, meter the scene with Zone Light Meter, set the flash, and pick any shutter speed you like to balance ambient against the strobe. Most focal-plane bodies cap you at a slow sync speed. This one never does.

Build is solid prewar German metalwork, heavier than it looks, the kind of camera that survives being knocked around in a bag for decades. There is no meter. There never was. You set exposure by hand, every frame. An incident or spot reading gives you the exposure the Superb was never born with, and once you have placed your shadows you transfer aperture and speed straight to the lens.

The honest weakness sits in the controls. The Superb's layout is its own language, with the shutter speed and aperture set on dials that read backward from what you expect after years on a Rolleiflex, and the gear-driven focus feels heavy and deliberate rather than quick. It rewards patience and punishes the photographer who wants to grab a frame in a hurry. The film transport does have a frame-advance stop on the standard model, so you are not purely counting numbers in a red window, but the whole machine asks you to slow down.

Today the Superb sits in the collector-and-user middle ground. It costs less than a clean Rolleiflex and more than a beat-up Yashica-Mat, and people cross-shop it against both. Buy it for the Art Deco looks and that gear-driven parallax trick, not for speed. Shoot it slow, in daylight, with a handheld meter, and the uncoated taking lens gives you a soft, lower-contrast medium-format look that the coated glass after the war traded away.