1956 Voigtländer Vito B

The serial number dates this Voigtländer Vito B as 1956 production. It’s a fully manual and very compact camera. This one has the Voigtländer accessory rangefinder, probably of the same era. Holding is believing, the build quality of this camera is excellent and because it’s fully manual it attracts less buyer interest than the later Voigtländer Vitomatic models with built in exposure meters and rangefinders – you can find Vito B’s on ebay for $20-$40 quite readily. This one was a $20 buy, it has the cheaper 4 speed “pronto” shutter, and doubt it’s hardly ever been used. You have to have film in the camera for the shutter to fire. To test it, open the back and manually rotate the film guide sprocket until the shutter clicks into place. At one point we thought the shutter had jammed but what had happened was that the self timer lever must have got snagged somehow in the camera bag. Manually resetting the timer lever fixed the issue thankfully. The photos it produces are nothing short of stunning for such a compact camera with a relatively small lens. The very first picture we shot with the camera on Kodak T-Max 100 is quite respectable for a walk around town snap. Edge to edge definition is very good, very little distortion and exposures are precise. This one’s a keeper!