Voigtländer Vitessa L1957

History

Voigtländer launched the original Vitessa in 1950 as a high-specification 35mm compact. The folding Vitessa (1950–1952) was followed by the non-folding, fixed-lens Vitessa A and B bodies, which refined the plunger-advance into an unusually compact package. By the mid-1950s, the market expectation for serious compact cameras had shifted toward built-in exposure meters; competitors like the Leica M3 (1954) could accept clip-on meters, while purpose-built meter cameras were appearing from Agfa, Kodak, and Zeiss Ikon.

The Vitessa L was Voigtländer's response: a Vitessa body with a selenium meter integrated into the top plate beside the plunger. The meter reads through a forward-facing cell and displays EV values on a dial; the photographer uses the EV scale on the Compur shutter to set aperture-shutter combinations. The "L" is generally understood to stand for "Licht" (light) in reference to the meter, though Voigtländer's internal documentation is inconsistent on this point.

The Vitessa L was produced for a relatively brief period before the Vitessa line was superseded by the simpler Vito-series bodies, which offered broadly equivalent quality at lower cost and without the mechanical complexity of the plunger advance.

Why It Matters

The Vitessa L sits at the intersection of two things Voigtländer did well in the 1950s: unusually refined mechanical engineering (the plunger advance is faster in practice than a conventional lever — a single push readies the next frame) and optical quality through the Color-Skopar lens family. The 50/2.8 Color-Skopar is a sharp, well-corrected Tessar-type design that holds up well against contemporaneous German glass.

The selenium meter without battery dependence is notable for modern users: there is nothing to fail electronically, and a healthy selenium cell still provides useful readings 65 years later. Many surviving Vitessa L bodies retain functional meters. The leaf shutter flash sync at all speeds (a leaf-shutter advantage over focal-plane cameras) remains practically useful.

As a collector and shooter object, the Vitessa L is less common than the Vito B or Vito C series but more accessible than the earlier folding Vitessa. Its mechanical distinctiveness — the plunger, the integrated meter, the Color-Skopar optics — makes it a more interesting user camera than the price might suggest.

Sample Photographers / Notable Use

• Used as a compact everyday carry camera by European amateur photographers of the late 1950s, a market segment the Vitessa L was specifically designed for.
• The plunger-advance mechanism drew contemporary press coverage as a novel human-factors solution for reducing shutter lag between shots.
• Collected today primarily by Voigtländer specialists and vintage German camera enthusiasts; less widely traded than Leica or Zeiss Ikon rangefinders of the same era.

References

• Camera-Wiki: Voigtländer Vitessa
• Wikipedia: Voigtländer Vitessa