Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2004/05/08
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Today I was rummaging about in the "used" bins of a local camera store, and came upon a near-mint shoe-mount brightline viewfinder. It's a short cylinder, shaped very much like the classic Leica 50mm viewfinder. It's black, with the brand name "TELESAR" is inscribed in silver upper-case letters on the top of the finder, and a thin silver line runs around the cylinder just above the tops of the letters. The finder has two sets of yellow bright lines, each with close-up marks just below the top. The front of the finder also reflects a yellow color. The view is a bit reduced, and seems similar to my .72x "M" viewfinders. The build quality seems very high. The lines appeared to be about 35mm and 50mm frames. I thought, "this could be useful." So I took it home, and where I found that the inner frame wasn't 50mm after all. The outer frame was just a smidge narrower than the 35mm frames on my M cameras, but the inner one was somewhere between the field of view of a 50 and 75mm. So I did a little creative viewfinding of a tape measure, and came up with the following: 1. Using the horizontal (long) view of the frame, the wide bright lines would match about a 37mm lens (on a 35mm camera). 2. The narrow bright lines would match a 66mm lens on a 35mm camera 3. The frame proportions are not quite right for 35mm cameras. The inner framelines have a ratio of about 1.33 or 4:3, the outer framelines have a ratio of about 1.4, or 5:7. Weird that they're not the same. Can anyone tell me what camera and lenses this finder was made for? I suspect I could use this thing as a reasonable finder for 35mm lenses. But perhaps someone has the matching camera and has been searching high and low for this finder. . . --Peter