Rangefinder camera reviews – Here you will find a list of all the rangefinder camera reviews that have been published on 35mmc. If you aren’t aware of the nature of a rangefinder camera, you can find a guide to what they are and how they work here.
As with all the content on this website, if you find something of interest, you can find more similar products by clicking on the tags you will find at the bottom of the reviews.
The Contax T is a compact rangefinder introduced in 1984. It was the first in what would become a line of premium point-and-shoot cameras, a segment pioneered by Contax. It was also the first Contax camera developed since acquisition of the brand by industrial giant Kyocera (formerly Kyoto Ceramic Company), and they aimed to make a splash.
As with most photographers over a certain age, I began my photography shooting film back in the late 1980s. By the mid 2000s I was shooting only digital for work and decided to get rid of almost all my film gear. Then around 2012 a wave of nostalgia overcame me and I decided to get myself back into shooting film. I decided to go for a Hi-Matic 7s as that was what I remember as our family camera when I was growing up and I happened to think it’s a very elegant looking rangefinder camera. Hipsters would look on in envy as I’d pass them by, camera dangling from my wrist from a hand crafted leather strap…
A few months ago, I spent some time reprocessing panoramas that I took years ago. These were the standard panoramas based on standing in one place and rotating the camera with overlap on each frame. I showed some of them to a friend here in town. He responded that he was scanning some of his Hasselblad XPan negatives. Would I like to use the camera? What? There is an Xpan cameras in my little town and I can use it? You know my response! In 2004, I rented an XPan when I was working in Seattle, so I had some familiarity with the concept, but I barely had time to experiment with it.
For me, there are two parts to this hobby of ours. The first is shooting these old cameras. The second is finding them. Which is how I found myself lining up at a dead stranger’s house at 8:30 AM (this is early for me, dear reader.) In today’s film revival era of $300 Canon AE-1s, estate sales are where I now look for cameras.
My name is François, and I’m a 30 year old born in Belgium and currently living in Denmark. When I was around 15, my granddad gave me his Canon AE-1, describing it to me at the time as one of the most sold and easiest to use film cameras. This is how I started shooting, and continued shooting for a couple of years, on and off, mostly leaving the aperture on automatic and not much understanding all the subtleties and possibilities of photography.
Then in 2009-2010, as I was getting more interested and with digital SLRs all the rage, my families gifted me a Canon 500D with a 18-250 Sigma lens, which I used quite intensely, learning more about the exposure triangle, trying long exposures and light painting in the dark; shooting family events and then parties at university, and more or less letting my grandad’s camera collect dust.
In 2015, I then sold my Canon 500D and bought a second-hand Fuji film X100s – never having been a huge fan of (nor really getting skilled at) editing my photos, the Fuji was a perfect companion – good lens, fairly compact, stylish, great jpegs. And I still have it to this day.
The call of film
But then, during the pandemic, I was like many people looking for something to help me pass the time, and decided to get back into film.
