When I was a teenager back in the late 60's I was really into the Single Lens Reflex game, it seemed every month Popular Photography and Modern Photography were covering the latest and greatest SLRs coming out of Japan......Canon, Nikon, Minolta, Pentax, Topcon, Miranda and others were coming out with more and more complicated thru-the-lens metering systems which was relatively new at the time. I had a Canon TL which was about $200 at the time, all metal, all mechanical, a great camera. There was another genre of compact 35mm cameras....Rollei was the standard bearer with their Rollei 35S line of compact, full frame cameras. This was way before IC chips, these were full mechanical cameras with a battery operated light meter, and Rollei shoehorned all of this into a relatively compact camera of 950mm x 670mm x 400mm weighing about 350 grams. It was really ingenious, all metal, no cheap plastic parts, very stout, back slid off. Shutter speeds from 1/2 to 1/500 sec, f2.8 Sonnar lens, it was the best compact camera for professionals to carry when they just had to have a camera available to get an image. I dug my 35S today and took some pics of it, it hasn't had film in it for probably 35 years but it still works. Good memories. Now everything is plastic and throwaway.
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