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Analog Tales 6: The Canonet QL17 G-III

27.4.2024 von Guido · Category: Analog, Blog, Cameras, Film

The Canonet QL17 G-III came to me as a surprise. I had been thinking about a lightweight 35mm rangefinder as an always-in-the-backpack alternative to the heavier Canon A-1 and even tried out a Minox 35 EL recently, but was not satisfied with the small viewfinders. An Olympus Mju or XA looked tempting, but when this Canonet showed up in the shop I could not resist. At about 650g it’s certainly not a featherweight like my Agfa Optima, but it still only weighs half of what the A-1 with the big zoom lens does. It will be challenging to shoot with a 40mm fixed focal length, but I guess I will just have to be creative and it will be a flashback to the 1980s with my Agfa. I have not yet decided what film I should use in it, but I’m sure I’ll take it out for a photo walk in the coming weeks.

The Canonet QL17 G-III introduced in 1972 was the final and best incarnation of a long range of Canonets that began in 1961 with the original model. The top version of the range was sold for over a decade and still is in high demand because of its sharp six-element 40mm f/1.7 lens and automatic aperture exposure function that could also be turned off for completely manual usage. It also has a double-window rangefinder like much more expensive cameras. Sometimes called the “poor man’s Leica” it certainly can’t rival the Leica M series that dominated the upper-class rangefinder market in the 1970s, but it is still one of the best and affordable 35mm rangefinder cameras of that time.

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Analog Tales 5: The Voigtländer Vitomatic IIa

8.3.2024 von Guido · Category: Analog, Blog, Cameras, Film

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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