Voigtlander Bessa 66

Press a button on the side and the front of this flat black slab springs open on scissor struts into a working medium-format camera. That is the Bessa 66. It folds down to something the size of a cigarette case, slips into a coat pocket, and shoots a square 6x6 negative on 120 film, twelve frames to a roll. The "66" in the name is the format, not a model year.

Pull the lens forward until the struts lock and you are holding a real medium-format body that a minute ago was barely there. Focus happens by scale on most of these, since the basic versions have no rangefinder and you set distance by eye against a footage scale on the lens. The viewfinder is a small reverse-Galilean window, bright enough but tiny, the kind you squint into rather than compose through. Film advance is by a little red window on the back, where you watch the printed frame numbers crawl past as you wind.

The shutter is a leaf unit built into the lens, and it runs from a full second down to about 1/500 at the top. It does not slam or thunk. It just whispers, a soft metallic tick, because there is no mirror and no focal-plane curtain. On the flash-synced versions that leaf shutter fires flash at every speed, not just some slow ceiling, which matters more than you would think when you want a touch of fill against a bright sky. The earliest prewar examples shipped without sync, so check what shutter your particular body wears before you plan a flash shot.

The catch is that there is no meter in this camera. It was built in an era when you read the light yourself or off a handheld cell, and the selenium meters that did exist were separate accessories. So you are on your own for exposure, and a square negative is unforgiving when you guess wrong on contrast. This is exactly where a phone helps. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app gives you the meter the body never had, and on a synced shutter a daylight-fill reading pairs cleanly with whatever speed you actually want.

The payoff for the patience is a big negative, lovely optics on the better-specified versions (the better-corrected Skopar or Heliar lenses), and a body that disappears into a jacket. People buy these now as a travel camera, the medium-format you bring when a Rolleiflex is too much to sling around a city. The weakness beyond the missing meter is age. These are eighty-year-old folders. The bellows develop pinhole light leaks, the struts go loose, and an unserviced shutter will lag or stick at the slow speeds. Budget for a CLA before you trust one with a real roll. Get a clean example and you have a square-format camera that cost a fraction of a Rollei and slips into a pocket the Rollei never could.