Smallest camera with hotshoe and aperture priority

[f16sunshine]

Yashica GX
Small and lightweight, AE, Coupled RF, fast 40mm f1.7, Can easily use two SR 44 batteries.
Comes in Silver and Black. Great little camera.

 

[k__43]

I have Oly 35 Trip. Small, metal, no batteries, but auto and normal hotshoe.

With flash, f8 and ISO400 film.

The Trip is awesome! I was blown away from what I've got from that little thing!
Trip 35 + flash is super!

 

[JoeLopez]

Any love for the tiny Minolta Hi-Matic F?

Minolta Hi-Matic F Rangefinder by Joe Lopez, on Flickr

 

[hap]

Olympus XA....RF, electronic shutter, AE, flash, OVF.....

 

[Godfrey]

Any recommendations?
Minox 35 and copies came in my mind but all of these have the restriction that if you attach something else than a flash to the hotshoe the camera is shooting in flash synch only. (~1/125)

I want to add an optical viewfinder, it should have aperture priority or full automatic and minimal shutter lag.
...

I'm just curious: Why do you want to add an optical finder to a Minox 35? They all have very good 35mm optical finders built in.

 

[Godfrey]

... Tiny indeed, and unlike the Rollei little cameras, it is designed w/ a human in mind :] Putting the winder and flash on the bottom defies common sense. ...

...
Well, I can live with the upside-down hot shoe and re-winder on Rollei 35, but I really dislike the tiny focus ring (I have small hands already), it is almost a deal breaker for me. I also wish there is a distance guide inside the Rollei finder, like the MC did. But it seems that Rollei wants you pre-focus before you move your eye to the finder. ...

The original Rollei 35 was designed with a specific kind of human factors in mind: it was conceived around the notion of setting up the exposure and focus while looking down at the camera from the top before lifting it to your eye. That's why all the settings and the metering readout are large and extremely visible looking down from above. The notion is that with a scale focus camera, you set up focus using the distance scale and the DoF markings (they're highlighted to show the most commonly used settings. This was how the 35, 35S and 35T all worked, and they are wonderful.

The SE the TE models produced later on adopted a less useful configuration with through the viewfinder metering indication using LEDs. I always found them to be much more awkward and slower in use, but they were appealing to the meme of the mid-1970s in trying to nearer "full information viewfinder" like an SLR of that time. It never worked for me.

Fitting the large rewind crank on the bottom made sense given the limited space to put it elsewhere on such a small camera. Fitting the hotshoe on the bottom made it awkward, especially with the Rollei flash unit, but with some other small flash units it was actually very handy to shoot flash with verticals since it rotated the camera just right and put the flash above and left of the lens so that shadows worked the right way. With the Rollei 35 Classic series in the late 80s/90s, they reinforced the top deck of the body and re-located the flash shoe to the top. This made it easy to shoot landscape oriented with flash but made it awkward to shoot verticals—insufficient space to grab the camera properly when it was rotated. I kinda preferred my S over my Classic Platinum for this reason when I was using the flash.

Still have the black Rollei 35S that I traveled all over the world with in the '90s. It's more a keepsake now than a working camera, but it's still in perfect condition.

G

 

[Archlich]

It's off topic but I once had a Petri Color 35 and genuinely hated it. No focusing on the go as you've got no idea where you're focusing at - all distance marks are crammed into the viewfinder and none left on the barrel. And that focusing wheel - what a pain to operate with, as you are constantly searching for that invisible locking position where Infinity is supposed to be (those who actually used one would know what I'm talking about).

I much, much prefer the Rollei 35, with which the lens locks into position without endless fiddling with a wobbly wheel, and you could do proper scale focusing at waist level. What a relief!

 

[Archlich]

As for the OP's request, if the Minox 35 doesn't cut it, why not look into one of its (usually improved) copies? The Ricoh FF-1(s), Cosina CX-2 and (the rather uncommon) Vivitar 35EM are fine candidates. The Ricoh and Cosina are program AE, the Vivitar aperture priority. All come with hot shoes.

Especially the Vivitar, which has a rebadged sibling called Revue 35 Compact Electronic. It is small! No larger in volume than a Rollei 35.