Approx. dates of manufacture: 1960 - 1964
Approx. original price: $tbd
Approx. street value: $20
I have a bunch of these things, and I think every one of them is broken. That's not the fault of the camera, I bought them cheap to learn how to work on them and then never got around to it. Or started it and got stuck. Some day...
There
L.jpg)
are a lot of different variations, but the basics are the same. Canon had made high-end 35mm
rangefinders for decades, many of them with interchangable lenses. But in 1961 they decided to go down-market with a mid-tier,
fixed-lens rangefinder, which they called the Canonet. According to a book,
"How Canon Got Its Flash Back," the Canonet was their first mass-produced camera.
That big selenium cell is the obvious way to recongize it. Selenium cells are photovoltaic, which means they generate electricity when light strikes them; so there's a little ammeter inside which measures the current—the more light, the more current and the more the needle deflects. The bubbles on the surface are actually little lenses which restrict the path of the light so that the cell only sees around a 30° angle, similar to what the lens would see. That way the camera meters what it's pointed at.
On this camera, the meter is hooked up to the diaphram in the lens to run on "automatic" mode: you choose the shutter speed and the camera picks the appropriate aperture. Nowadays that would be called shutter-priority automation.
Another major difference between this camera and its successors is that it has the winder on the bottom housing, not on the top. In the late 50s/early 60s when film advance levers were introduced (as opposed to knobs), sometimes they were on the bottom, sometimes on the back, and only sometimes on top. It wasn't until about the mid-1960s when top-mount levers became the de-facto standard. My Kodak Retina Reflex III has a bottom-mount advance.
If you look at the advertisment (click on it for a larger version), it's fun to see the 1961 version of "full automation." Compare that to Canon's AF35M 20-years later, which has auto-exposure, auto-focus, auto-film advance and auto-film-rewind.
This Canonet was superseded in 1965 by the Canonet QL cameras.
Sorry for the lack of a photo. I thought I had one but I can't located it; so at the moment this page is a placeholder until I can get one at a reasonable price.