Voigtlander Vitomatic II

Pick up a Vitomatic II and the weight tells you everything before you've shot a frame. It is a small camera that lands in the hand like a chunk of milled brass, dense and cool, nothing like a contemporary plastic-topped Kodak. Voigtlander built it in Braunschweig at the end of the 1950s, and the idea behind it was straightforward. Take the rigid-bodied Vito line, the company's compact 35mm cameras, and add the two things demanding amateurs kept asking for: a coupled rangefinder and a built-in meter. The Vitomatic is what came out, a rigid body with both bolted in.

The fixed Color-Skopar is the heart of the thing, a 50mm that Voigtlander fitted to a long list of its cameras because it earned its keep. It is a well-regarded normal lens with a good reputation among people who shoot these bodies, and on a clean copy the glass still delivers. Focusing runs through a coupled rangefinder patch, and the finder is genuinely good for the era. Bright, with the rangefinder patch sitting in the middle, so framing and focusing happen in one clean view. The meter, though, you read in a separate match-needle window up on the top plate, so checking exposure means glancing down off the finder. On a clean sixty-year-old amateur camera that bright, accurate rangefinder is a big part of why people keep these around.

The shutter is a leaf unit living in the lens, running from a full second up to about 1/300. It closes with a soft click rather than a slap, no mirror to settle, and because it is a leaf shutter it syncs flash at every speed. That still earns its place. A daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs cleanly with that sync flexibility, since you are not capped at some low X-sync ceiling the way you are on a focal-plane body. Set the aperture for your fill, pick any speed you like, and the flash fires in step.

The meter is where the years catch up. The Vitomatic II reads off a selenium cell, that wraparound honeycomb panel above the lens, and selenium fades. No battery, which is the charm, but six decades on most of these cells read low or read nothing at all. If yours still moves the needle, treat it as a rough guide and nothing more. Match-needle metering off a tired cell is how you end up with thin negatives roll after roll. That is the real weak point, and it is the argument for ignoring the built-in meter entirely.

So who buys one now? Someone who wants a proper German rangefinder without paying Leica or Zeiss Ikon money, and who likes the deliberate pace of a fixed normal lens. To my eye it cross-shops against the fixed-lens Olympus 35 bodies and the folding Retina IIc, usually winning on finder quality and losing on pocketability, since it is the chunkier camera. The following is small but devoted. Find one with clean glass and a working rangefinder, treat the selenium cell as decoration, and carry an incident reading instead. It will keep shooting long after the meter has quit.