Voigtlander Vito CD

Picture a tourist in 1963, standing on a bridge over the Rhine, holding a small chrome and black 35mm camera at chest height while a needle wobbles in a little window on top. That is the Vito CD doing its one job. Voigtlander built it for the person who wanted a German-made camera that did the thinking, pointed it at the scene, matched the needle, and pressed the button.

It is a fixed-lens viewfinder compact, not a rangefinder, so focusing is by guess. You set the distance on the lens scale by estimating it, and you accept that there is no patch and no split image to confirm you got it right. The finder is a bright reverse-Galilean window with frame lines, clean and simple, and there is no focusing aid in it at all. That trips up people who expect a rangefinder patch. You estimate, you stop down a little for safety, and the leaf shutter does the rest.

That shutter is the good part. It is a leaf unit running from a full second down to about 1/500 at the top, and because the blades sit in the lens it syncs flash at every speed. There is no mirror, so the camera is dead quiet and there is nothing to slap. You hear a soft click and a faint clockwork whir, and that is it. Loading is ordinary back-door 35mm, the body is solid for its size, and it carries the dense, machined feel that Voigtlander put into its postwar compacts.

The honest weakness is the meter. The Vito CD reads through a selenium cell, the kind that needs no battery and ages badly. Sixty years on, a lot of these cells have drifted slow or gone dead, and a dead selenium meter cannot be revived. It just sits there. This is exactly the body to pair with a phone meter. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app stands in for the cell that finally quit, and because the leaf shutter flash-syncs across the whole range, a daylight-fill reading you take in the app drops straight onto any speed you like.

Today these go cheap. People who shop them now line them up against the Olympus Trip 35, which is worth saying plainly is a later camera (it arrived in 1968, after the Vito CD's run had ended), so the comparison is a used-shelf one and not a period rivalry. The Trip gets more attention because its meter is more famous, but the Vito CD has the better build and that quiet leaf shutter. Buy one with a working cell if you can, accept a dead one if the price is right, and meter it yourself. A guess-focus compact with a clean lens and a healthy shutter still earns its keep on a strap.