I figure I've talked about the high end so I suppose I should talk about the low end as well.
This is the Sears 35rf, possibly from the late-70s or early-80s, but I'm not really too certain about that. It's a store-brand clone of the Ricoh 35rf which I understand is a simplified version of the more nicely constructed Ricoh 500G, but the lenses used in all three cameras are the same.
With a 40mm f/2.8 lens this is no Canonet QL17, but I found this camera at a thrift store for $4 which included the working Sears brand flash. Made mostly from stamped steel and plastic, this little camera certainly feels...um...inexpensive, but operationally, there's not much to complain about and it 's much lighter than a QL17. Unlike the Canonet the light meter still functions when you're shooting manually, but there is also a shutter priority mode in which the camera indicates via match-needle the aperture being selected. Fortunately the camera uses a standard 1.5V alkaline battery which is easy to come by.
The rangefinder patch is on the dim side, unsurprising given the inexpensive nature of the camera, but it's at least reasonably accurate when you can see it. The focus throw on the lens is fairly short so there's not much use for terribly accurate focusing anyway, and with a maximum f/2.8 aperture you're not going to be getting super shallow depth of field to begin with. The brightlines are also kind of difficult to see in dim lighting, but they're not really that accurate anyway so you're not loosing out on much. The lens isn't bad, at least up to compact standards, but it's nothing all that special either. The ASA rating only goes up to 800, so if you were wanting to push some HP5 to 1600 or shoot some TMZ3200 to compensate for the slowish aperture you'll have to deduct a stop or two from the indicated value.
All of this sounds like I'm pretty negative on the camera, but I'm really not. No, the rangefinder experience is not up to Leica standards--does anyone honestly expect that from these pocket rangefinders--but it's perfectly usable and probably preferable to your basic AF 1980s compact cameras. In fact, what so impressed me about this camera, was that in something smaller than a Walkman (the sort that plays cassettes rather than MP3s), and probably cheaper too, you had a camera that gave you all the manual control that you could expect from a much larger and more expensive SLR type camera. Yeah it was cheaply made, but it was a cheap camera.
Anyway, for awhile when I was in college this was my go to travel camera and it rode along everyday in my bag, and made a couple trips to Chicago and St. Louis with me. I was never unhappy with it, but ultimately I replaced it with an Olympus Stylus Epic mostly for the built-in flash.
Examples:
