Voigtlander Vito B

Voigtlander had been making folding Vitos since the 1930s, and in 1954 they finally killed the bellows. The Vito B is what came out the other side: a rigid little 35mm body in aluminum and chrome, built in Braunschweig at the tail end of West Germany's optics boom, when every camera maker in the country was racing to put a sharp lens in a small box. It mattered because it took the Vito name downmarket without making it feel cheap. This is a precision object that fits in a coat pocket.

Pick one up and the first thing you notice is the weight. It is denser than it looks, all metal, cold in the hand on a winter morning. The 50mm Color-Skopar up front is the reason people still hunt these down. It is a coated Tessar-type four-element lens, and stopped down to f/8 it is genuinely excellent, with the kind of bite that makes you forget you paid two figures for the whole camera. The shutter is a Prontor leaf unit running from one second to about 1/300 at the top. It does not slap or clunk. It clicks, softly, the way a good mechanical watch does, and because it is a leaf shutter it syncs flash at every speed.

There is no rangefinder and there is no meter. You focus by guessing distance and turning the lens to the marked footage, which sounds terrible and is actually fine once you live at f/8 and let depth of field cover your sins. The early Vito B has a small squinty finder; the later version got a bigger brighter window, and if you can find that one, buy that one. Film loading is conventional bottom-and-back, nothing clever, nothing that fights you.

The honest weakness is exactly that missing meter, paired with scale focusing that will burn you wide open. Shoot a portrait at f/3.5 and miss the distance by a foot and the eyes go soft. This is not a camera for fast candids of moving kids. It rewards a slower hand and a stopped-down aperture.

Today it sits in the cheap-and-cheerful tier of usable classics, cross-shopped against the Olympus 35 rangefinders and the Retina line, and it usually undercuts both. People buy it for the Skopar and for the build, and they tolerate the scale focus as the price of admission. Since the body never had a meter, an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app is how you place exposure. Read the light, set the aperture and shutter by hand, then forget the numbers and shoot. That is the whole workflow, and on a sunny afternoon it is a quietly wonderful one.