What I look for in any camera is simplicity of operation. Whether a camera has a good focusing and viewig system is important, whether it has a meter and/or autoexposure is all fine, as long as it will do what I want. Many of the later, higher-end film and digital cameras have so many modes and configuration options, on both focus and exposure systems, that I find them exasperating. Who really wants to have to understand all that just to set the focus correctly, set the f/stop and exposure time correctly?
Usually, with older film cameras, a meterless camera is less expensive to have serviced if the camera has been sitting around for decades. For example, I love the Kodak Retina IIc and IIIc cameras, have several of them. All of the IIIc cameras have problems with the ancient selenium cell meter. I've had three IIc cameras serviced and they now work like new, perfect, and are instant pleasure to use. I'd like to get one of the IIIc serviced but the meter is dead and unresurrectible, and it has a big ding in the top cover ... but I want to use that Schneider 50mm f/2 lens: a stop means a lot when I'm working with an ISO 40 film. So I have another otherwise beat IIc with a good top cover and I'll have the IIIc transformed into a "IIc Plus" with no meter.
Be that as it may, when I was young, my first 'real' cameras (beyond box cameas) were a 1963ish Minolta 16-Ps that I bought myself when I was about 8 or 9; then when I started high school, a 1949 Rolleiflex that my grandfather loaned me, and an Argus C3 that my mom gave me (her old camera, my father bought her a Retina IIIc). The Minolta had an exposure guide built into the camera ... 1/100 and 1/30 second shutter speeds, f/stops from (I think) f/2.8 to f/16 with symbol markings for exposure zones. That taught me a lot. The exposure guide that used to be printed inside the 35mm film boxes taught me a lot. A little later, I found my uncle's ancient Weston Master exposure meter that made accurate exposure much easier. This all happened quickly, over the course of about a year, because then my uncle helped me buy a Nikon F Photomic FTn with 50/1.4 lens and ... WOW! I had TTL metering and focusing! The quality of my photos made a giant leap with ALL the cameras. I understood much more then! The Nikon allowed me to see exposure and focus zone so much more clearly, understand the relationships and trade offs between them!
As the years have flowed by, I've owned and used so much equipment of all kinds, first film and then digital, that much of that early joy of learning is diminished. So much of today's equipment has a 300 page book to describe 25 different AF system optionss and 46 different exposure automation modes and conveniences ... It's just too much, my brain and eye don't want to deal with it. Trying to learn all of that and actually take advantage of it is more tedium than learning joy. So my equipment has slowly migrated back to mostly pretty simple to operate cameras ... simple if you consider manual focus and selecting an aperture and shutter speed (with or without a meter) a relatively trivial matter.
(And I find that with most modern cameras with built in meters, manual focus and aperture priority automation ... working the EV compensation by judging scenes with my eyes ... still works the best for me. And if I don't have a meter in the camera, I take a reading with any meter I might have available to get a baseline, and then guesstimate by eye.)
I just acquired another new camera, the new InstantFlex TL70 Plus from MiNT. I am delighted that the camera was easy to figure out without looking at the 20 page instruction book. I put two packs of film through it, using both manual and auto exposure modes. And discover again that it takes me more time to understand the in-camera meter and automatic exposure evaluation it can do than it does for me to guess, or use my incident light meter.
It is what it is. I love making photographs, and I like my cameras to be as simple as I can get them to be as long as that's complex enough to do the job in a wide variety of lighting and subject situations. I like seeing what everyone else does with their cameras too, regardless whether they are "frame the picture and push the button" photographers or "fuss and worry over every specific details" photographers. It's all good.
😀
G
Decorated Rocks with Twigs - Santa Clara 2023
Leica M10 Monochrom + Summicron-M 50mm f/2, Green filter
ISO 1250 @ f/8 @ 1/180
