Silverbased

It may be stretching a point to review the Voigtländer Bessa-R as a “vintage camera”: This model was only discontinued a few years ago, and several of its younger siblings are still in active production.

Yet for a classic rangefinder lover, the appearance of this new camera in 2000 was like throwing raw meat in front of a hungry beast: The “R” of the model designation might as well stand for Retro Rangefinder Revival.

For years I have happily bought and enjoyed used equipment; but the Bessa-R and its matching lenses actually caused me to open my wallet and plunk down serious cash on new-in-box photo gear for the first time in decades.

Think Different: Bessa-R versus Canon Rebel DSLR. With the digital’s crop factor, both lenses give equivalent coverage, speed

Despite the umlaut-festooned name, the current Voigtländer lineup comes from Japan’s Cosina. This is a company which has been quietly cranking out cameras for many decades—but with only a tiny fraction sold under their own name.

Over the past 30 years, Cosina ironed out a standardized kit of parts—including shutter, film transport and meter electronics—to build a basic, no-frills SLR. And this “platform” (as the auto industry would call it) was quickly adaptable to different lens mounts and camera styles. So, many entry-level cameras for other brands were really manufactured by Cosina, like the Nikon FM10, the Canon T60, Olympus OM2000, or any of the Vivitar SLRs.

The rest of Cosina’s business is making optical glass and lens components—and interestingly, building computer LCD projectors (again, all sold under other brand names). Anyway, they’ve developed quite a lot of expertise at being the low-cost supplier of optics and opto-mechanical products without compromising quality—for example, making aspherical lens surfaces cheaply.

But the president of the company, Hirofumi Kobayashi (the son of Cosina’s founder) is also a camera nut, and in particular, a lover of vintage German rangefinders. So eventually he had the brainwave, “Let’s launch a ‘prestige’ brand to show people what we can really do.”

After some wrangling, Cosina worked out the licensing to use the trademarks from the long-defunct Voigtländer company of Germany (although Cosina still doesn’t own the name outright). This licensing arrangement is why the cameras are still weirdly marked “Voigtländer Germany” on the top and “Made in Japan” on the bottom.

Cosina’s first bombshell product was an ultrawide, rectilinear 15mm f/4.5 lens of excellent quality (including an accessory wide-angle viewfinder that was impressive by itself). This was something even Leica & Zeiss hadn’t attempted before; and even if they had, it would certainly have cost thousands of dollars. But Cosina priced it at under $400.

The original camera body offered to match the 15, the Bessa L, was an oddball with no viewfinder of its own (scale focusing being fine, given wide-angles’ enormous depth of field). The L was a rather quick-and-dirty adaptation of Cosina’s standard SLR camera platform—but notable for its idiosyncratic revival of Leica’s pre-WWII 39mm threaded lens mount. (LTM or M39 for short.)

Voigtlander Bessa R; at left, the tiny 21mm wide-angle with accessory viewfinder

Cosina’s next body was the Bessa R, their first rangefinder model. This also shocked people, by offering an outstandingly crisp and bright viewfinder that was arguably clearer than that of many “classic” models from Leica, Contax, Canon & Nikon. The R’s film door and top and bottom panels were made of plastic, which caused some rangefinder purists to bristle, but this did allow for a lighter weight body.

And Cosina kept introducing more and more interesting, top-quality lenses. One strength of lenses for rangefinders is that without an SLR’s flipping mirror in the way, a lens can recess more deeply into the body and be made much more compact.

This Voigtländer Ultron 35mm f/1.7 can be much smaller than an equivalent lens for SLRs

Also, because slow lens speed does not reduce viewfinder brightness, rangefinders let you opt for even svelter, moderate-aperture lenses if you prefer that. For an interchangeable-lens travel kit, a Bessa R plus a few lenses saves ounces even compared to the far-from-chubby Olympus OM system equivalents that I own.

I bought and adore Cosina’s laughably-tiny 21mm f/4.0 wideangle (which needs an auxiliary viewfinder, natch). A lens this wide is not something you need every day; but it’s so compact that it’s painless to carry it along for the moments you do:

Compared to the elitist pricing of the Leica M series, Cosina simply rewrote the cost/performance equation for rangefinder lenses. They are not always cheap relative to SLR equivalents, but the build quality is always solid and nicely finished. The silky feel of the half-stop aperture detents on my 35mm f/1.7 is quite lovely.

A variety of companies besides Leica have made 39mm thread-mount lenses over the years, particularly Canon (in their 1950s, pre-SLR days). These all turn up on eBay from time to time, including some cheap, idiosyncratic Russian optics originally made for the Zorki and Fed rangefinder cameras. The quality control with these is quite erratic, but you can get lucky and find an excellent one.

Ratty-looking but surprisingly sharp 1961 Jupiter-8 lens, 50mm f/2.0. Standard equipment on many vintage Zorki Russian rangefinders

After the Bessa R, Cosina followed up with the R2 model. This was essentially the same camera, but with metal panels all around, plus a change to a different lens mount: Leica’s “modern” (post-1954!) M-series bayonet. (There’s an adapter which allows you to mount 39mm Leica thread-mount lenses on an M bayonet body, with no loss of function.)

The R and R2 bodies can be ID’d at a distance by their top plate, which slopes away diagonally from the viewfinder windows. All subsequent Bessa models have a step-down top panel design instead, and all continue the M bayonet mount and metal construction. The current bodies weigh about 10% more than my old plasticky R.

The bayonet attachment is obviously a lot less fumblesome than the thread mount for changing lenses quickly. (Threading lenses onto an M39 body goes easier if you rack their focus out to the closest distance, thus retracting the rangefinder coupling.) And the throat of the M bayonet is a little larger, allowing for wider-aperture designs.

So, while the original Voigtländer lens lineup used screw mounts, the trend is for the recent Cosina introductions to be M bayonet only. (Note that you can’t go backwards and mount those on an R screwmount body.) Cosina’s new M bayonet 35mm f/1.4 looks very nifty—even lighter and more compact than my f/1.7 threaded version. But the later lens releases have been accompanied by price increases, making them less of a bargain compared with the original series.

Cosina’s good work also caught the attention of Zeiss: Today there is a new Zeiss Ikon rangefinder line, manufactured by Cosina (in fact, just a re-engineered version of the Bessa series). This is intended as a showcase for Zeiss’s top-end lens designs. All but two of the lenses are assembled by Cosina, however.

Why Rangefinder?

But to take a step back for a moment… There’s a more general philosophical question, about what rangefinder cameras are good for.

Unlike an SLR, rangefinders allow you to maintain “eye contact” with your subject right through the moment of exposure. Also, the area visible outside the framelines can help you anticipate where unpredictably-moving subjects are headed next. So rangefinders have long been a favorite for people photos and street shooting.

I find that my Bessa is the camera I grab for group events, where I expect to take shots of people wandering around interacting with each other.

Compared to the shallow depth of field of an SLR groundglass, the RF viewfinder sharply renders all of the potentially distracting clutter within the frame. You might find this makes you more conscious of when you need to move around to get a clearer viewpoint.

On the minus side, rangefinders aren’t the best choice for exact, tight framing. Most rangefinders stop focusing at about 3 feet from the camera. Different brands have more or less accurate framelines, but you generally get a bit more coverage on the film than what the viewfinder showed. That’s fine if you don’t mind “casual” framing, or plan to crop anyway—but I’m a no-cropping purist, and this aspect sometimes bugs me.

An RF viewfinder does not change its angle of view when you switch lenses; with the Bessas you need to flip a lever to switch in different-sized framelines matching each focal length. But this means that for a particular viewfinder, there is only one frame size that makes the maximum use of the visible area.

Switch to a wider lens choice, and you’ll need an auxiliary viewfinder (slid into the camera’s hot shoe). Go to longer focal lengths, and you’ll be framing your subject in successively smaller rectangles within the middle of the image. Thus, on my Bessa R the 35mm frame is great to use; but the one for a 90mm lens is really somewhat marginal.

You get used to all this quickly enough—but it’s not quite the seamless experience of swapping lenses on an SLR. And manufacturing an interchangeable lens mount with rangefinder coupling adds a lot to the complexity and cost of the camera.

So if you always plan on using just one focal length, you might consider that there have been many delightful fixed-lens rangefinders made over the years—often quite a bit more compact than the Bessa line, and with leaf shutters bordering on the inaudible. I have long pined to own a 1970s Yashica Electro GX—nice and compact, with a fixed 40mm f/1.7 lens and aperture-priority auto. But they’re maddeningly difficult to find in North America, although apparently less so in Japan.

Anyway, today’s current Bessa lineup has become rather confusing, with autoexposure and manual versions of three different viewfinder variations. Two remarkable new models are the R4A and R4M—unfortunately the most expensive ones—whose viewfinder shows the view of wide-angle lenses up to 21mm without a need for auxiliary viewfinders.

All the Voigtländer “A” models offer both manual metering and aperture-priority autoexposure—although their electronic shutters mean they’re dead without batteries. I have not personally touched any of the auto versions, but the description/diagram of the viewfinder display makes it sound slightly distracting to me.

The Bessa bodies offer the cheapest entry point today into a modern rangefinder system. But as their prices have crept north of $500, I’m becoming less enthusiastic about their value-for-dollar (My own closeout Bessa R was just $250). Ultimately, they are all still derived from the same old econo-SLR platform, so they share a few quirks and flaws:

• Because they’re based on a retooled full-sized chassis, their height and width is really no smaller than a typical film SLR. It’s only in their front-to-back body+lens depth where they have a significant advantage.

• The metal, vertically-traveling shutter provides for a nice 1/2000 sec. top speed, and flash sync at 1/125th. But it is not nearly as quiet as the iconic, cloth-shutter Leica shlurp. Instead, a Bessa makes a pretty sharp “clack.” (Actually, if you want stealth, any leaf-shutter camera is the best alternative.)

• The strap lugs on the R are on the front of the body—unmoved from their original SLR position.

However, given the lack of a mirror box, and the smaller RF lenses, the balance is completely different: With lighter lenses, the camera hangs at an angle, digging its hot-shoe into your ribs. (The lug position doesn’t appear to have changed with the current lineup.)

• With the subjects I shoot, I definitely hit the RF close-focus limit more frequently than I’d like.

• A black Bessa R is finished in black paint over white plastic for its top panel—which makes its inevitable “brassing” look particularly tacky. (Would it have been so hard to mold that part using solid black resin?)

• Most worrying, the film transport derived from their old platform just doesn’t quite have the reliability that you’d expect in a $500 camera. About once every second or third roll, my R has a brief frame-spacing hiccup (though this appears to be getting better, not worse, with wear). And I’ve heard a number of stories of people experiencing total jam-ups. On the other hand, I’ve also heard of people “fixing” the problem by sharply thwacking their Bessa against the heel of their hand (if you try this, I’m not responsible).

Now against all of that, I must end by mentioning the positives: A Bessa is just about the handsomest camera around (especially in black). The viewfinder is simply a delight. (A DSLR-using acquaintance once literally gasped when she looked through it—this fueled at least two full months’ worth of smugness on my part.) And the wonderful Ultron 35/1.7 is on my short list of lenses to grab whilst running from my burning home.

Plus, a camera that flies so completely in the face of today’s camera mainstream is a proud, defiant badge of eccentricity—one I am happy to wear.

I’ve been having a pang of guilt lately: So far, this blog been a little heavy on the tech-talk, and a little light on showing photographic examples. So lets look at a pair of images. (Click to see larger versions, which will be easiest to compare opening each in a new browser tab.)

Cemetery sculpture: camera ‘E’

Cemetery sculpture: camera ‘M’

Both show the same subject, from the same camera position, and include the same angle of view. The tonal ranges may not match perfectly, but I’ve adjusted them them to be pretty close. So what’s the difference?

Well obviously, the upper image shows much more detail in the background. The zone of sharp focus—aka depth of field or DOF—seems to be much deeper. This is particularly obvious with the twigs at the right edge: The lower image isolates a few; the upper one shows a whole thicket. So that first image must have been shot at a much smaller f/stop, right?

Heh, heh. Gotcha. Would you believe me if I told you both of these photos were taken at the same aperture—f/4.0?

So what on earth created such a huge discrepancy in the depth of field? Simple: The bottom image was shot on 6×4.5 format film, using a 110mm lens. The upper one was shot on my digital compact, where the corresponding focal length is about 11mm. (The digital image has been very slightly cropped to match the film frame.)

Let’s take a brief optical detour to understand why this happens.

Focal Length Changes with Format

Old-school photographers who jumped between 35mm, 120 and sheet-film cameras learned that as you switched formats, you also needed to shift gears thinking about focal lengths.

For any desired lens coverage (say a “portrait” lens, or a moderate wide-angle), the corresponding focal length scales up in proportion to the film’s dimensions. For example, one well-known guideline is that a “normal” lens is one whose focal length equals the diagonal of the image.

Thus, a normal lens for 4×5 sheet film has a focal length of roughly 160mm. But the tiny sensor chip in my digital compact could fit atop a pencil eraser. So the zoom setting corresponding to a “normal” lens for this format is about 7mm.

And those exceptionally short focal lengths lead to extreme depth of field (just as switching to shorter focal lengths does with any camera).

Fuzzy about Focal Lengths

By the end of the 20th century, most serious amateurs shot 35mm exclusively—so, awareness of how focal lengths related to film size began to fade. It became an easy shorthand to quote 35mm-format focal lengths to express how wide or narrow a lens’s angle of view was. If you said “I’m shooting with a 28 today,” everybody understood what kind of perspective you were talking about.

But the digital-camera explosion spawned a plethora of different chip formats—all much smaller than 35mm. Focal length confusion roared back with a vengeance. Camera marketers despaired that publicizing this crazy-quilt mix of new focal lengths would cause chaos and confusion. What did a “12mm lens” even mean in this brave new world?

So they latched onto the well-intentioned—but wholly fictitious—crutch of specifying “35mm equivalent” focal lengths.

These bogus 35mm equivalents will only serve to confuse us. So please, forget they ever existed! It’s the actual, optical focal length we are talking about here. (If not labeled on the lens, it might take some rooting around in your owner’s manual or the image EXIF data to find out the true f.l. numbers.)

Whither Depth of Field?

Meanwhile, the DLSR world had its own confusion. Photographers could now put their old film-body lenses onto new digital models, with “crop factor” sensors. But if a 50mm lens “acts like” an 80mm on your DLSR, then what happens to the DOF? It’s still the same lens, right? To this day, whenever the issue comes up in online forums, discussions can get quite agitated, with dogmatic assertions and misleading generalizations.

Once again, the DOF issue has nothing to do with digital—it’s simply another effect from scaling between one format size and another.

But confusingly, there are two factors to consider:

As I mentioned, smaller image formats require shorter focal length lenses to capture an equivalent angle of view. And a shorter focal length lens gives deeper DOF.

However, a smaller format must be enlarged further to give an equal-sized image to view (whether printed or onscreen). This higher magnification means any fuzziness becomes more detectable—i.e. the limits on how much blur is acceptable become more stringent. So paradoxically, you’d expect depth of field to get shallower with smaller formats.

in this Optical Steel-Cage Death Match, I’m sure you’re breathlessly wondering—who wins? Well, I won’t keep you in suspense: The focal-length effect trumps the magnification one. The essential rule is:

When f/stop, distance, and lens angle-of-view are all held constant, the larger the image format, the shallower the depth of field.

Of course, shallower depth of field is a double-edged sword. Here’s another pair of photos—also both taken at f/4, again differing only in image format:

Depth of field: small-sensor digital camera

Depth of field: 645 film format

The lower, 645 version helpfully takes all that distracting background junk and throws it out of focus. Yet even with this flat-ish subject, only the raised hand is in good focus; the eyes and the right edge of the sign drift off into fuzziness, just because it was at a slight angle to the camera. Shallow DOF places more demands on the photographer (and here, I blew it).

But an equally vital observation is this: Any camera based on a tiny image format (and this includes virtually all digital point-and-shoots) gives you no chance to use selective focus creatively.

All the digital P&S images shown here use the longest available focal length, the widest aperture, and are shot fairly close to their subjects. Thus, they represent the most favorable combination for achieving shallow, selective focus. Yet in all cases, the backgrounds appear sharp enough to be cluttered and distracting.

If this still seems all rather unintuitive, it helps to try plugging some representative numbers into a depth-of-field calculator, like this nifty online one. Remember—you must change the popup for image format, not just the focal length. (Depth of field calculators make certain simplifying assumptions, and are not the last word on the subject; but they’re a great way to compare what happens as you change one factor at a time.)

But, is this just a minor geeky technicality, or does it matter… artistically? Well, here is my final photo comparison. Same ground-rules as before:

Depth of field: digital point & shoot

Depth of field: 645 film format

Scout’s honor here: I did not move the tripod an inch. Now I’m hardly claiming the second image is timeless art. But the upper (digital compact) version is just a tangled, impenetrable mess. With no way to blur the background, and pull the viewer’s eye towards the cattails, there is simply no photograph at all.

Yet today, millions of people are doomed to use cameras where this effect is unavoidable. Again, this is not a “digital-versus-film” issue per se; it’s simply an inevitable result of the smaller image format.

But is it really fair to compare a cheesy digital point-and-shoot to a serious medium-format camera? Well, there’s one last little detail I haven’t mentioned yet.

The film camera I used here is a Mamiya m645—a recent purchase off eBay. While well-worn and probably 30 years old, its sturdy construction seems ready to keep kicking for a few more decades. The 110mm lens was “bargain” grade from KEH.com. The price? Actually—together they cost $50 less than what I paid for my digital point & shoot.