Picked up at a local market in Cluj, this Minox 35 GL was the second of two broken Minox bodies I brought home that day. The first, a GT, had slipping film advance gears. The GL looked perfect…leather case, even the original hot shoe cover… but once powered up it fired only at its mechanical backup speed of 1/500s. The light meter was dead, and opening it revealed the ISO circuit board had literally shattered.
With nothing to lose, I transplanted the GT’s ISO board into the GL body, carefully unsoldering and refitting the tiny wires. To my surprise, the operation worked. The exposure circuit came back to life, and the camera now functions exactly as intended.
Introduced in the late 1970s, the Minox 35 GL was one of the smallest full-frame 35mm cameras ever made. It features a sharp 35mm f/2.8 Color-Minotar lens, aperture-priority auto exposure, and manual zone focusing, all in a genuinely pocketable body. Fully electronic and deceptively simple, it’s a brilliant example of how compact engineering met serious image quality.
This one isn’t just a camera… it’s a rescue.
