The Voigtländer Vitomatic IIa was my Grandfather’s 35mm rangefinder camera of choice in the early 1960s. While our first 35mm negatives date back to 1955 and there must have been other cameras before the Vitomatic IIa and my mother’s Lordomat SE, the Vitomatic was his favourite camera until he got a Pentaflex SL in 1966. His Vitomatic IIa was bought in January 1962 according to a datestamp on the manual, about a year after it was introduced. It has the less expensive Color-Skopar 50mm f/2.8 lens, but was still an amazing camera for its time. I still own the original camera which is in reasonably good shape, but the light meter is not working anymore and the slow exposure times are lagging. Fortunately I was able to find an identical one with a working light meter and only slightly inaccurate shutter speeds, so I might shoot some film with it sometime.

The Vitomatic IIa was the most popular version of several 35mm cameras in the Vitomatic series that started in the 1950s with a lot of different models and culminated with a series of excellent caneras. The Vitomatic IIa has an optical split-image rangefinder and a coupled match-needle rangefinder that is both displayed on top of the camera and in the bright, large viewfinder. Most of the cameras were sold with the four-element Color-Skopar 50mm f/2.8 lens, but a small run was produced with the sharper and more light sensitive Color-Ultron 50mm f/2 lens. They were not inexpensive cameras, not as pricey as a Leica but still definitively middle class. Today, the Skopar models are still widely available and not particularly expensive, because 200.000 of them were made in the early 1960s. Those with the Ultron lenses, like some other Voigtländer cameras, are more rare and often fetch prices in the triple digits.

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