Rangefinders v.s. SLRs

I know the title of this post is going to draw some disagreements and maybe even some anger. I’m well aware that there are a lot of devoted users of both rangefinders and single-lens reflex cameras out there. I will preface everything I write in this as being, simply, my opinion. I’m not trying to convince anyone to stop using either or thwart anyone who is considering one. Yet, if this helps someone who is trying to move into film photography, it will have served its purpose. 

It won’t take you long to see that I really don’t like rangefinders. Now that I’ve said the quiet part out loud, I feel better already. I no longer feel the need to watch countless reviews on old rangefinders and parse through them on eBay, hoping this one will change my opinion. The therapeutic value of all of this cannot be understated. Perhaps it is just me. Perhaps it has simply been my desire to like them that has driven me to buy and test whatever looked promising. And I do so want to like them.

Let’s be honest, rangefinders just look cool. Their small size, their incredible engineering, and their portability just scream photography. Nobody who likes to take images can look at one and not imagine themselves walking through some exotic city with one hanging on their wrist, quickly snapping away at those fleeting, candid moments that we all dream about. Additionally, all the great pioneers of photography used them. How could I possibly prefer an SLR?

Those of us who are currently alive have been fortunate to live in this place in history. The tail-end of the film photography apex. It was only back in the 1990s that digital cameras appeared on the scene, and those early ones were more or less very expensive toys. With the exception of real estate photographers who could use the low-resolution images that they produced, nobody was throwing away their film cameras to buy one.

Today, as vintage camera fans, we have a plethora of choices when it comes to film photography. We can walk as far back into film photography’s history as we desire, choosing any type of camera that we fancy. As a testament to all of these cameras and their quality construction, they can still be found on the used market. So, although we do not have a catalogue with dozens of choices of newly made film cameras, as people did when these cameras were introduced, we can literally jump ahead to another decade or another generation of our choosing. 

Don’t want to mess with a box camera from 1900 (such as the Kodak Brownie)? Jump ahead to 1925 and try the Leica I. Don’t like that one after all? Sell it and try the 1928 release of the Rolleiflex Standard K2. A Twin-Lens Reflex camera. Not really what you thought it would be? Jump on the time machine and pick up one of the many Single-Lens Reflex cameras that were introduced in 1936. You get my point. Now, let’s contrast that with the folks who were actually living through these evolutions.

Cameras were a luxury, not a hobby. They were expensive, just as the high-end digital cameras of today are. People were not able to buy the Brownie and then throw it on eBay over the weekend to try a totally different system. They were pretty much stuck with whatever they chose for years. That’s what they took to weddings, birthdays, and any other significant event that they wanted to document. That’s why, even today, I feel a small pang of guilt at the ease and (usually) the affordability of buying a vintage film camera. Today, their ease of obtainment has turned simply buying and owning them into a hobby. I don’t believe for a second that our ancestors wouldn’t have thrown down their Wet Plate cameras in 1851, had someone offered them a rangefinder and a few rolls of film. 

So while we are certainly hampered by the lack of new film cameras being made, we are also blessed that we have so many choices of camera systems at our fingertips. I know the digital world frequently uses the term “system” to refer to Canon vs Nikon, etc., but in this case, I am referring to different designs and technologies entirely. 

But as we know, technology changes and evolves, and it is usually (in a free society) the marketplace that chooses the winners and losers. They don’t always get it right, i.e., VHS vs Betamax, but usually they do. The first rangefinder camera that was released to the public was in 1932. The first SLR camera that was released to the public was a mere four years later, in 1936. So for many decades to follow, the two would co-exist in the world at the same time. The SLRs going largely unnoticed by the photographers of the day.

There are many reasons why the public and professional photographers would eventually shift away from their rangefinders. Just a few are....

• Accurate framing and focusing on the SLR.
• An endless choice of lenses that really introduced new opportunities for creativity and faster speeds.
• Metering through the lens (TTL), which made the success rate of each frame skyrocket, as far as correct exposure.
• In the 1970s, automation began creeping in, making it possible to shoot faster and more accurately by turning over at least some of the decisions to the camera. A feature that was attempted to be incorporated into rangefinders, but by then, the shift to SLRs had begun.
• Eventually, SLRs would be able to become automated while still reducing the size and weight of the body, which appealed to the public and professionals. This, once the stigma of using an “automatic camera” had passed and the concept was accepted. 
• Rangefinder brands were much slower to innovate, and they continued to focus on premium markets as opposed to the mass public.

Rangefinders were really the first generation of cameras that the general public could affordably and conveniently use to take their own photos. There were exceptions. Pin-hole cameras and others, but when the rangefinder cameras hit the open masses, photography quickly became the number one hobby in the United States. It was suddenly “big business”.

I suppose, being the first evolution of anything will almost guarantee your demise at one point. In the evolving world of technology, there is always the next big thing, right around the corner. And yet, just as Kodak would get lazy and complacent with their film, even when they saw the digital explosion happening around them, many camera manufacturers refused to abandon their successful rangefinders, even as SLRs became more and more prominent. 

The ‘art’ of photography struggled as far back as its inception to be accepted as an art form, due to the  many painters of the day who viewed it as a threat. But photography would not really get ‘creative’ until the surge of SLRs and the technology that drove them. It could be argued that while there were art galleries showing a lot of (what we now call) street photography and large format images, the images themselves were more of a documentary type. They were moving and candid and told a story, but the real creativity would begin with the faster lenses and camera bodies that eventually came from investments in SLRs and their systems.

It is not the fault of the rangefinder itself; it was a product of its environment, and it was trapped by the limited technology of its own day. As manufacturers moved away from rangefinders, reluctantly or not, the R&D money was shifted to the SLR market. Could rangefinders have ever evolved to the point that SLRs did? I guess we’ll never know because at some point, the public and the professionals of the day decided that they preferred SLRs, and the money was rerouted. So today we are stuck with most rangefinders having a fixed lens (of course, there are exceptions) and very slow shutter speeds (1/500th being the most common).

Suddenly, with the SLR, we could take high-speed photos, we could take low-light images without flash, and we could expand one camera body for any genre of photography we wanted. To include macro-photography. Sure, it is bigger and heavier, but whether or not that trade-off is worth it or not, depends on the type of photography you are doing. Can you do street photography with an SLR? Of course, Vivian Maier did it with a TLR! Is a rangefinder’s size and ‘unobtrusiveness’ more suited to Street? Again, yes.  

Today, we have the freedom to choose either one, both, or something else entirely. But this freedom comes with a cost. The cost of riding on this time machine is that the cameras we love are aging and dying, despite our best efforts to maintain them, repair them, and keep them in use. Yeah, I know there are some newer film cameras being made, but the days of companies investing millions into R&D for a film camera are over.

All of this brings me to one of my main reasons for disliking rangefinder cameras. They are dying at a high rate of speed compared to other systems. It is not uncommon these days to buy one in ‘mint’ condition and still experience shutter issues, rangefinder misalignment, or lost and/or faded focusing screens. There are some premium rangefinders out there that were made later (commanding a very high price) and are escaping this fate for now, but for the largest part of them, they’ve seen their better days. 

Since starting this blog, I have lost track of the supposed ‘working’ rangefinders that I have bought in order to review here, and that might change my mind and make me a rangefinder fan. Before I could get a roll of film through many of them, they died or seized up while I was using them. Now, I’m not a camera technician by any means. But like most of you reading this, I know how to repair sticky shutters, unglued mirrors, broken wires, etc. Yet despite my best efforts, the patients just could not be saved.

Is it fair for me to compare aging rangefinders to their more modern versions? Maybe not. But my reasons for disliking them go beyond just the mechanical unreliability of them, and I understand that in a few years, many SLRs will suffer the same fate. But I have to live in the world around me, and in that world, the rangefinders are dropping like flies.  

Acknowledging that SLRs will be the next to die, as the years pass, they do have the advantage of being produced well into the current century. So, there are still several models of SLRs that are much younger than most of the rangefinders out there. Granted, many of those newer SLRs have electronics in them, and that carries its own hazards for longevity, but as of today, most SLRs that you buy, even unserviced, work to one degree or another. 

A second reason that I am not fond of rangefinders is that I simply do not enjoy the shooting experience. Every time I try to take one out, taking each photo simply begins to feel unnecessarily difficult. The viewfinders are nonexistent compared to an SLR, so focusing is a test of patience. They are small and ‘closely’ engineered, which means that you almost always have to take your eye away from the camera and your subject to adjust things like small film advance levers, tiny aperture and shutter markings, and anything else that needs to be done between shots. The lenses on every one that I own have to be focused as far as twenty or thirty feet away, before they hit infinity, and finally, they will almost all need an ND filter for shooting in bright light because most of them have a max shutter speed of 1/500th. There are many early SLRs that share that shutter speed, but due to their continued evolution, many are faster.

Again, these are just my opinions and experiences with rangefinders, and you may be one of those who truly enjoy the experience of shooting with them. For me, if there were a brass ring at the end of the rangefinder process, I would shoot with them too. If the resulting image was so unique or so incredible that it could never be replicated with a different system (like SLR, medium format, or large format cameras), I would never put mine down. But that’s not the case. 

Street photographers will argue that rangefinders are less obtrusive (I agree), faster to shoot (I disagree), quieter to shoot (I agree), and easier to walk around with all day (I somewhat agree). The fact is that I can take a small SLR like a Nikon FE and put a 24mm lens on it (with a focus of about 6 feet before reaching infinity) and take some quite fast and candid street shots. The speed comes from not the small size, but not having to focus on anything further away than 6 feet. Rangefinder fans may bristle at that, but ‘not focusing’ will always be faster than even the newest auto-focus. 

I can honestly say that since I abandoned the digital world, which I was deeply involved in for years, and returned to film, I have never had an SLR fail on me while shooting it. I don’t think I’ve even bought an unserviced one that I couldn’t immediately push a roll of film through. I’m not an engineer, but I suspect that the larger bodies allow for greater tolerances for the parts inside, and that may directly affect their reliability over a rangefinder. Also, many top-level film cameras that came later began to incorporate weather sealing. Other factors, too, no doubt play a part. The mercury batteries in the old rangefinders, within their small bodies, (and the gases they emitted) certainly played a role in the demise of internal parts. 

The reality is that unless you manage to come across an unused film camera, all of these cameras are simply being passed around from one person to the next, online. They’ve all been tinkered with or had someone else's version of CLR done to them. This, I have found, is less common on SLRs than rangefinders. Rangefinders provide easy access to shutters and viewfinders as well as internal lens parts.  These cameras make maintenance look just easy enough to get someone to step in over their head. Like calm waters that hide the riptide underneath. And in all fairness to the folks who take this plunge, what choice do they have? If their shutter begins sticking or some other issue arises, are they really going to spend more to have it serviced than they spent to buy it?

So my suggestion to anyone starting out in film photography would be to let the past lie in the past. We all romanticize about being that cutting-edge photographer, running around the streets, and taking shots on our rangefinder. The truth is, you are more likely to go home with shots that are out of focus, over-exposed (from sluggish shutters), or not exposed at all (from shutter failures). Instead, try a later model SLR, which may be a little heavier to carry, might be a little louder, and might not be as sexy looking, but will probably deliver 36 sharp and well-exposed images in return for your efforts. And you can also sleep better knowing it will probably continue to perform for the next 10-20 years.