// CANON CANONET QL17 · 1972
BRASS TOP-PLATE · wears to gold, not to ruin
CLOTH SHUTTER · recalibrated to ±2%
0.91× FINDER · still unmatched in 2026
▶ THE PROTAGONIST // EST. 1954
Seventy years on, nothing has improved on it. Only gotten lighter, louder, and less honest. Double-stroke advance. A finder you fall into. Brass that records every trip it ever took. This is the bar every other body on this site is measured against.
INSPECT THIS BODY →● SAFELIGHT ON · DARKROOM 02
OBSCURA · 1996
DEVELOPING▮
6 of 6 BODIES · hand-picked, hand-serviced
grab the roll & pull · every body we've had on the bench
EVERY BODY CROSSES THE BENCH BEFORE IT CROSSES THE COUNTER.
Every body arrives a stranger. We log the serial, fire a test frame, and write down everything that's wrong before we touch a single screw.
Down to the casting. Sixty years of grime, fungus, and fossilised lubricant come out, and the correct lubricant goes back in by hand.
Curtains and leaves timed on the bench against a photodiode. Every speed back to within ±2%, or it doesn't go in the case.
New light seals, fresh mirror foam, eyepiece cleaned, and the focusing screen checked against a reference body before it goes back together.
A full roll through every camera, developed in-house. If the negatives aren't perfect, it goes back to step two.
CERTIFIED BY HAND · 90-DAY MECHANICAL WARRANTY · SERIAL LOGGED
Thirty-six frames. No delete button. Film makes you look before you press. That's a kind of attention a 2GB memory card never asked of anyone.
A 1960 Planar still out-renders most of what ships today. We service every lens by hand: fungus out, focus true, aperture clicking like it left the factory.
FIG. 1: light, doing what light does, through 60-year-old glass.
A fully mechanical body needs no firmware, no charger, no cloud. Wind it and it works. We sell cameras older than the internet, and they'll outlast it too.
Highlights that roll off instead of clipping to white. Grain that's in the film itself, not sprinkled on in software after the fact.
BROWSE BODIES →two people, one workbench, one darkroom.
Twenty years on the bench, most of it under a loupe. Handles the shutter timing, the seals, the re-lubes. If a body leaves here, it's because the test negatives came back clean.
Estate sales, attics, camera fairs. Decides what's worth saving and what's parts. Answers the emails, eventually.
OBSCURA: two people, a workbench and a darkroom. New York → the world, since 1996.
the answers, before you ask. press [+] to expand.
Every one is fully serviced and shot-tested before it's listed. See THE BENCH above. Each ships with a 90-day mechanical warranty.
Worldwide, insured, tracked, double-boxed. Most orders leave the darkroom inside 48 hours: 2–4 days in the US, 5–10 worldwide.
30-day returns. No questions, no restocking fee. Send it back and we refund the body in full.
Always. We buy, trade, and take consignments, clean glass especially. Mail us the model and condition for a same-week quote.
We've sold 11,402 bodies betting yes. Bring one roll on a trip; you'll stop asking.
leave your mark · demo book: entries stay on this terminal only
how this was actually built · every moving part
Designed, written & built by hand by SELENE DIGITAL.