Voigtlander Vito BL

Shoot a wedding reception in a dim hall and the Vito BL does the one thing a focal-plane camera cannot. The leaf shutter syncs flash at every speed, all the way up to its 1/300 top mark, so you can drop a flashbulb into a bright window scene at 1/300 and the whole frame lights evenly. No black band, no waiting for a 1/60 sync ceiling. Fill flash outdoors, balanced against a sunny background, is this body's home turf, and it owns it while the focal-plane 35mm cameras of the era are stuck syncing at 1/50 with a cloth curtain.

The BL is the metered cousin in Voigtlander's Vito B family. Where the plain Vito B had nothing but a clean lens and your own judgment, the BL bolts a selenium cell across the front and a meter window into the top deck. You read an exposure value off the needle and transfer it to the lens. There is no battery anywhere in the thing, which is the upside of selenium: leave it in a drawer for a decade, pick it up, and it still works as long as the cell has not gone tired. That is also the catch. Seventy-year-old selenium drifts. Plenty of BLs you find today read a stop or two slow, or sit dead.

In the hand it is a German tool from the period, dense for its size with controls wound tight. The viewfinder on the later large-window BL is genuinely good, bright and roomy, a real step up from the squinty finder on the first version. Focusing is by scale and guesswork; there is no rangefinder patch, so you set distance by estimate or by the depth-of-field scale on the lens. Loading is conventional bottom-hinged 35mm, the wind is a thumb lever, and the leaf shutter clicks rather than slaps. Using it is a quiet business.

The lens is the reason people keep these. The BL carries the Color-Skopar, a four-element Tessar-type that draws sharp and contrasty in the middle and renders color cleanly, offered in f/2.8 and f/3.5 versions, so check the front ring before you buy. On a compact you can actually pocket, the Skopar still pulls its weight. This was a travel camera, a vacation camera, the small 35mm a fifties amateur slipped into a coat pocket. Today it sits among the affordable all-mechanical compacts next to the Vito B and the various Retina bodies, bought by people who want a small mechanical 35mm with a great lens and do not care about autofocus or automation.

The honest weakness is the meter, or rather its age. A drifting selenium cell turns the BL's whole reason for existing into a liability, and recelling is rarely worth it. The fix is to ignore the top-deck needle and meter the scene with the Zone Light Meter app instead, taking an incident reading and setting the aperture by hand. With that, the BL goes back to being a quiet, sharp, scale-focus compact whose leaf shutter will fill-flash a backlit portrait at any speed you like.