Film tested and fully working including the light meter. In stunning cosmetic condition for age (please see photos) Case has signs of age an wear, but has done a great job keeping the camera protected. This is by far the cleanest example of this camera I have ever seen in all my years of selling cameras. Still has some old film inside.
The Ricoh Auto 66 is one of those proper mid-century engineering cameras — a 6×6 square-format TLR designed for serious amateur photography at the time, but with a slightly unusual twist: it was one of the earlier cameras to introduce a kind of “automatic” exposure system using a selenium meter.
It’s still fully manual in practice, but instead of choosing shutter speed and aperture directly, you often work around the meter’s guidance, which makes it feel like a halfway step between classic manual cameras and later automatic systems.
Shooting it today feels slow, deliberate, and very “studio-style” even if you’re just out in the street. The waist-level finder and square format give it a distinctive, almost cinematic way of composing images.
