Between 1972 and 1982, Canon sold over 1.2 million copies of the Canonet QL17 GIII. It was, by most measures, the best-selling coupled rangefinder with a built-in meter of all time. It was manufactured for a decade, refined to near-perfection, and then discontinued without ceremony when the market moved on to autofocus SLRs and the age of the compact rangefinder came quietly to an end.
It has never been replaced. Nothing quite like it exists today.
What Made It Special
The Canonet GIII was a 35mm rangefinder with a fixed 40mm f/1.7 six-element lens, full shutter-priority automatic exposure, complete manual override, and a build quality that observers consistently compared to cameras costing significantly more. The lens, in particular, is extraordinary — sharp, contrasty, with a rendering that holds its own against the best lenses available on far more expensive cameras of the era.
The body is metal, compact, and precisely made. The rangefinder patch is bright and clear. The shutter priority metering works accurately in the vast majority of shooting conditions. The Quick Load film system — the QL of the name — genuinely simplifies film loading in a way that feels like it should have been standard on every camera ever made.
At its original retail price of ¥29,000 in 1972 — roughly equivalent to a few hundred dollars today — it was priced as a high-end consumer camera. It competed, in its category, with the Leica CL. It won on value and arguably on handling.
The Battery Problem
The GIII was designed around the PX625 mercury battery, a 1.35-volt cell that has been banned from sale in most countries due to mercury content. The widely available alkaline equivalent delivers 1.5 volts and follows a different discharge curve, which causes the meter to underexpose progressively as the battery drains.
This is solvable. A camera technician can calibrate the meter to the alkaline replacement during a CLA. The Wein cell, a zinc-air battery available from specialist suppliers, provides the correct 1.35 volts in the correct form factor. The problem is real but not insurmountable, which is why CLA’d copies of the GIII remain popular on the used market despite the battery inconvenience.
The Cult Status
The GIII occupies an interesting position in film camera culture: it is both the recommended gateway rangefinder for beginners and a camera that experienced photographers return to. It is genuinely good rather than merely affordable. Its lens competes with far more expensive optics. Its handling is natural and unobtrusive in a way that more complex cameras sometimes are not.
This combination — true quality at a moderate price — has made it the camera most often recommended to anyone asking how to start shooting film with a rangefinder. That recommendation has also pushed prices up. A decade ago, a working GIII could be found for twenty or thirty euros at a flea market. Today, good copies routinely sell for several times that, and CLA’d copies command even more.
The Loss
What makes the Canonet a lost treasure is not that it is unavailable — working copies can still be found — but that nothing succeeded it. Canon made rangefinders and then stopped making rangefinders, turning entirely to SLRs and eventually to autofocus cameras. The category — a high quality, compact, manual rangefinder with a fast lens at an accessible price — was simply abandoned.
Voigtländer has partially filled the gap with the Bessa series. Leica continues to make the M cameras at prices that exclude most photographers. But the sweet spot the GIII occupied — genuinely excellent, genuinely pocketable, genuinely affordable — has never been reclaimed.
What we have instead is a million cameras scattered across flea markets, camera shops, attics, and eBay listings, each one a small record of a moment when a major manufacturer decided that a good camera at a fair price was a viable product. They were right. The GIII proved it, 1.2 million times over.