So, my girlfriend bought a new (second-hand) camera for me recently. It was quite cheap, around 35 bucks with the leather case included. It was an old Rollei XF 35. It came with fixed lens Sonnar 40mm f/2.3. Some say it’s a successor of Rollei 35, but it doesn’t seems like it. It’s not as sturdy as the old 35, not as compact either. But it has built-in rangefinder system, while 35 is only a viewfinder camera.

Unfortunately, this is a fully automatic exposure camera, minus the rangefinder bit where you have to focus manually. The rangefinder system is quite a mess in my opinion because it doesn’t have the parallax correction. At the same time, it also has very far minimum focus distance which is 1 meter. Any lesser than that, you won’t be able to focus it.

I just ran through two rolls of film through it. I still have yet to figure out how to manipulate the meter (although you can manually lock the exposure with half press the shutter) perfectly. For now I can say that it was built for a street style photography and any subject further than 5 meter would be a problem to be metered. I guess I just have to do more experiment with it.

Here I include some examples I took using a test roll, Agfa CT Precisa 100.