Voigtlander Vitomatic IIIb

Put a Vitomatic IIIb next to a Retina IIIc and you understand why people argue about these two. The Kodak folds flat and feels like jewelry. The Voigtlander does not fold, weighs more than you expect, and feels like it was machined from a single block. If you want pocketable, buy the Retina. If you want a dense, solid handful that takes a beating, this is the one.

The heft is the first thing you notice. There is a lot of brass and glass packed into a body barely bigger than your hand, with the cold, dense feel that German fixed-lens cameras from the mid-sixties got right. The viewfinder is the real reason to own it. It is large, bright, and it shows the meter needle and the rangefinder patch right there in the frame, so you focus and confirm exposure without moving your eye. The patch is a tidy bright rectangle, easy to fuse even in low light, and the focusing throw is short and well damped.

Up front sits the Color-Skopar 50mm f/2.8, a four-element Tessar-type. Stopped down a little it gets sharp across the frame and renders with decent contrast, the kind of look that holds up on slide film. The shutter is a leaf unit running from a full second to about 1/500, and it is dead quiet. You hear a soft click, nothing more, which is exactly what you want shooting people on the street. Because it is a leaf shutter, flash syncs at every speed, top to bottom. A daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs cleanly with that sync, so you can drop in flash at 1/500 in bright sun to lift a backlit face without fighting a sync ceiling.

Now the honest weakness. The IIIb carries a selenium cell, the kind that needs no battery, which sounds like a blessing until you remember how these age. After sixty years a lot of these meters have gone weak or dead, since selenium fades with time and light exposure, and even a partly working one can read low without warning. A drifting meter that still moves the needle is the trap here, because it reads with confidence while quietly lying. If yours wanders, treat the needle as decoration and meter the scene yourself. The good news is the shutter and rangefinder are purely mechanical, so the camera shoots fine with the meter ignored entirely.

These sit in a friendly price class today, usually cheaper than the Retina people cross-shop them against. The buyers tend to be photographers who want a fully manual rangefinder with a real glass finder and a quiet shutter, and who do not mind carrying a little extra weight for it. The shutter is simple and almost always still accurate. Light seals are the only routine service item, and a CLA is rarely the wallet event it is on more complicated bodies. For the rangefinder shooting experience without spending big, the Vitomatic IIIb is an easy camera to recommend, dead meter and all.