Voigtländer Bessa L

Voigtländer Bessa L

Imagine buying a brand-new interchangeable-lens camera, lifting it to your eye, and realizing there is absolutely nothing to look through. That is the Voigtländer Bessa L.

Cosina engineered this camera with a very specific philosophy: if you are shooting an ultra-wide-angle lens (like a 15mm or 25mm), the depth of field is so massive that a precision rangefinder is completely unnecessary. You simply guess the distance to your subject, set it on the lens barrel (zone focusing), look through an external viewfinder mounted on the top of the camera, and snap the picture.

Because it lacks the complex prisms and glass of a rangefinder, the Bessa L is incredibly small, wonderfully cheap, and absurdly lightweight at just 320 grams.

However, just because it's "blind" doesn't mean it isn't high-tech. The camera features an excellent through-the-lens (TTL) center-weighted light meter. But since there is no viewfinder to display the meter reading inside, Cosina did something genius: they put a 3-LED exposure readout directly on the outside of the top plate, just below the cold shoe. You can look down at the back edge of the camera, adjust your aperture until the green dot lights up, bring the camera up, frame, and shoot.

Underneath, it shares the same workhorse internals that would eventually go into the Bessa R: a robust mechanical vertical-travel metal focal-plane shutter that fires completely battery-free at speeds up to a blistering 1/2000s.

History

The Bessa L is arguably one of the most important cameras of the late 1990s because it proved that film enthusiasts were still hungry for weird, niche, manual tools.

The Ultimate Gamble (1999) Hirofumi Kobayashi, the CEO of Cosina, had just licensed the historic German "Voigtländer" brand name. To test the waters of the LTM (Leica Thread Mount) market, he didn't launch a flagship camera. Instead, he launched this strange, viewfinder-less plastic body alongside two absolute masterpiece lenses: the 15mm f/4.5 Super Wide Heliar and the 25mm f/4 Snapshot-Skopar.

A Cult Classic is Born The strategy worked flawlessly. Street photographers and landscape shooters went crazy for the Bessa L. It was the ultimate, unobtrusive "run-and-gun" setup. You could literally shoot from the hip, relying on the massive depth of field of the 15mm lens, and know you got the shot. The massive commercial success of the Bessa L gave Cosina the cash flow and confidence to build the fully-fledged Bessa R just one year later.

Legacy Today, the Bessa L remains the cheapest and most fun way to get into the LTM ecosystem. Because it lacks a rangefinder, there is practically nothing that can get knocked out of alignment. It is the ultimate "throw it in your bag and forget about it" wide-angle camera [1].

Sources

• [1] CameraQuest. Voigtlander Bessa L: The Wide Angle Specialist. https://www.cameraquest.com
• [2] 35mmc. Voigtlander Bessa L Review - The Viewfinderless Wonder. https://www.35mmc.com
• [3] Casual Photophile. Voigtländer Bessa L Review. https://casualphotophile.com
• [4] Japan Camera Hunter. Camera Geekery: The Voigtlander Bessa Lineup. https://www.japancamerahunter.com
• [5] Ken Rockwell. Voigtlander Rangefinder Cameras. https://www.kenrockwell.com