Voigtländer Vito CL – The Dad Cam – By Hans Gastafsson

I can’t recall any family vacation, outing, get-together when I was young that my dad didn’t have his Voigtländer with him. It almost seemed an integral part of him. Not that he ever showed any interest in photography as such, but he really liked to document his life. As a result he has a vast collection of photographs. Mostly slides, lots of Kodachromes obviously but also other brands and stocks. All slowly deteriorating. I am in a [really slow] process of scanning them and setting up some kind of digital archive, spanning from the early 60’s up until mid or late 80’s. I have a slight hope of presenting him with this archive before he turns 90yo next year.

Anyway, far back in my memory there is something that says it was the camera starting to act up, and he (for some reason) not wanting to buy a new one that that made him stop taking photographs until the digital era.

The Vito CL is a nice little camera so it would be nice if it still worked. Plus the added value of the history of it. The version dad had is the first 1961 version “Standard”. There were also a “DeLuxe” version with leatherette inlays and other cosmetic additions. There were two later editions in 1962 and -63 manufactured until 1967.

It’s fully manual with a selenium cell exposure meter and equipped with a Lanthar 2.8/50 lens. It has no range finder so being able to appreciate the distance setting is crucial. There are however three markings on the distance scale for “Portrait”, “Group” and “Landscape” which work quite nice as long as one keep the aperture stopped down 1 or 2 steps. Though built like the proverbial tank, this particular copy has a slight play in the lens which is a bit worrying. Even so I have not found any other faults (no, the self timer doesn’t work. Does it ever on vintage cameras…?) so lets get to work testing it.

I loaded it with a roll of Ilford FP4+ and set out to put it through its paces.

After processing the film and having a quick look at the negatives, the shutter speeds (1/15 to 1/500) seem to work extremely well with no visible difference of the exposure between any of them, which I find rather remarkable. Happy with result I cut the dried film and start the scanning. It almost immediately become clear why he stopped using it. Almost every frame is out of focus. And its not the missed-focus kind. The entire frames are blurry, even the exposure tests, which were made with a tripod without changing anything but shutter speed and aperture, shows different amount of blur. It’s a real pity as the camera is pure joy to use. Had it been a CLR, the R stands for Rangefinder, I might have considered sending it for repair but now I think it will only be on the shelf as memorabilia.

Anyway, these are the 4 images that turned out somewhat ok.

By the way, the image of the Vito CL was taken with  the 100mm/2.8 from the heavily underestimated Nikon Series E lenses. Camera was the FM2n and the film Ilford FP4+.

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