[Leica] Mystery Telesar viewfinder

[SonC at aol.com (SonC@aol.com)]

Telesar made (makes?) all kinds of do-hickeys, like fan  flashes, filters, 
diopter lenses, and auxiliary lenses.  They are the  type that slip over another 
lens to make it either wide angle, or slightly  telephoto.  This might be the 
viewfinder for a set like that.  I think  that brand also was applied to some 
lenses.  
Look here:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3814035253&category=30077
Regards, 
Sonny
In a message dated 5/8/2004 11:16:09 PM Central Daylight Time,  
pklein@2alpha.net writes:

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