Ray Sachs
Legend
- Location
- Not too far from Philly
- Name
- you should be able to figure it out...
This may be a dumb question (I was once told there's no such thing, but think that's hogwash - I've heard some and no doubt asked some that qualify BIG time!). I haven't used a true rangefinder camera in probably 30-35 years. And the ones I used in my youth were relatively cheap ones and had fixed lenses, not interchangeable. The idea of having two focus windows and lining up the images to focus makes good sense to me with a fixed lens - it should be a fairly simple calculation to do the triangulation and bring the two images together in sync with the focal range of the lens.
But how does this work with an interchangeable lens rangefinder like an M8 or M9??? I look at these things, I know they're manual focus, I see the two windows on the front of the camera that feed light to the OVF and I understand that you focus them the same way we did with the old ones - line up the two images in the viewfinder to achieve focus. But wouldn't this change with the focal length of the lens? Wouldn't a 28mm lens focus at a different point than a 35mm than a 50mm? Or maybe not? I guess distance is distance is distance and as long as the lens is designed to work with the Leica standards, the rangefinder focus could work regardless... But I have to admit I'm having trouble wrapping my feeble mind around this. The X-100 got me thinking about this even though it doesn't use anything LIKE the same mechanism, but it being a modern "rangefinder" knockoff, it made me start thinking about the real thing...
-Ray
But how does this work with an interchangeable lens rangefinder like an M8 or M9??? I look at these things, I know they're manual focus, I see the two windows on the front of the camera that feed light to the OVF and I understand that you focus them the same way we did with the old ones - line up the two images in the viewfinder to achieve focus. But wouldn't this change with the focal length of the lens? Wouldn't a 28mm lens focus at a different point than a 35mm than a 50mm? Or maybe not? I guess distance is distance is distance and as long as the lens is designed to work with the Leica standards, the rangefinder focus could work regardless... But I have to admit I'm having trouble wrapping my feeble mind around this. The X-100 got me thinking about this even though it doesn't use anything LIKE the same mechanism, but it being a modern "rangefinder" knockoff, it made me start thinking about the real thing...
-Ray