Voigtlander Vito CLR

Hand this to someone who says they hate fiddling and watch them relax. The Vito CLR has a fixed lens, a coupled rangefinder, and a leaf shutter, and after a roll or two your thumb finds everything without you looking. Voigtlander built it in the mid-1960s, and it carries that late-era German feel: brass under the chrome, a film advance that seats with a small firm stop, a body with real density for something this size.

The shutter tops out near 1/500, plenty for a 35mm compact, and because it is a leaf shutter sitting between the elements there is no mirror, no slap, no recoil. Brace against a doorframe and you can shoot near 1/15 and get away with it. Flash sync is where it pulls ahead of an SLR. A leaf shutter syncs at every speed, so you are not pinned to 1/60. Want fill flash on a face at 1/500 in bright sun to hold the background down? It does that. Pair a daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app with that sync flexibility and you can balance flash against a bright sky cleanly, which is exactly the trick most period SLRs could not pull off.

Using it is calmer than people expect. The finder is a combined bright-line viewfinder with a rangefinder patch, so you frame and focus without dropping the camera from your eye, then read the meter on the top plate. The 'R' in CLR is that rangefinder. The plain CL was the scale-focus, meter-only sibling; this one couples the patch to the lens, which means close focus is a strength, not a guessing game. Line up the double image, fire, done. On the street it is quick, and up close it actually nails the plane you wanted.

The weak link is the selenium meter, the cell behind the little honeycomb window on the front. Selenium needs no battery, which is genuinely nice, but it ages and drifts, and a sixty-year-old cell often reads a stop or more off, or reads nothing at all. Plenty of these get sold as working when the needle barely moves. That is the honest weakness, and it is why the Vito CLR trades cheap today rather than as a collector trophy.

People cross-shop it against the Olympus Trip 35 and the Yashica Electro compacts, and the Vito usually loses on price-to-glory because it lacks the cult name. What it offers instead is German build for not much money and a lens that renders with real bite stopped down. If the selenium cell is tired, carry an incident or spot reading instead, set aperture and speed by hand off the rangefinder, and the Vito CLR becomes a tidy, quiet little machine that earns its keep.