Voigtlander Ultramatic

Shoot a backlit portrait at high noon with fill flash, and the Ultramatic does something almost no SLR of its day could. The shutter is a leaf, not a focal-plane curtain, so flash syncs at every speed right up to the top of the dial near 1/500. You can fire fill at the fast end against a bright sky and tame the background instead of being stuck at 1/60 like every Nikon and Pentax shooter around you. That sync flexibility is the body's strongest card.

Voigtlander built it around the DKL bayonet mount, the three-claw system you also find on the Bessamatic and on Kodak's Retina Reflex bodies. The glass is the real reward. A Septon 50mm f/2 or a Skopar on the front gives you the dense, slightly cool Voigtlander rendering that people still hunt for. The body is dense and substantial, mostly brass and chrome under the skin, and the action has the precise feel German makers got right in this period. Loading is conventional 35mm, nothing clever.

Through the finder it is a mixed bag. The original screen is plain ground glass with no dedicated focusing aid, so you are judging focus off the matte; the later Ultramatic CS added a split-image patch that makes it easier. The headline feature in the finder is the meter. This was one of the early SLRs with shutter-priority automatic exposure, a selenium cell up top that picks the aperture for you. When it works it is genuinely clever for 1962. The problem is the word selenium.

Here is the honest weakness, and it is why these sit cheap in cabinets. The selenium meter ages. Sixty years on, most cells read low, drift, or have died outright, and there is no battery to swap because selenium makes its own current from light. The automation that was the selling point is the first thing to fail, and a working one is the exception, not the rule. The mechanism is dense and fiddly, so a proper CLA from someone who knows DKL bodies runs into real money.

That dead cell is exactly where a handheld meter earns its keep. The leaf shutter syncs flash at every speed, so a daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs perfectly with that sync flexibility. Take an incident or spot reading, set the shutter, pick the aperture yourself, and the body becomes the clean manual camera it always was underneath the automation. You lose nothing the meter was giving you and you gain control over where the shadows land.

Today the Ultramatic is a collector and tinkerer's camera more than a daily shooter. People cross-shop it against the Bessamatic, which is simpler and easier to keep alive, and against the Retina Reflex for access to the same DKL lenses. Buy the Ultramatic for the glass, the flash-sync trick, and the build quality, not for the meter. Find one with clean seals and a smooth shutter, expect to meter externally, and it will reward you with that distinctive Voigtlander look.