I have bright viewfinder envy.

[Wayne R. Scott]

Taffer,

Sign me up, I can donate a Kiev mount to the cause. I guess it is time to crop my herd of cameras and give in to the dark side of the Force and add a couple of M's.

Wayne

 

[taffer]

Wayne, you've been PM'd 🙂

 

[sychan]

Resist the red dot!

Resist the red dot!

Unless you really just want to have a Leica, for the sake of owning a Leica (which I will eventually succumb to), why not get the R2C?

And, just to put a Leica into perspective, you should try to fondle a Mamiya 6. It has a palatial viewfinder, with a very bright RF patch and with the vast acreage of a 6x6 frame, you can shoot fast film with boulder sized grain and still get detailed prints (shoot Kodak C35 B&W film pushed to ISO1200 and get huge, grainless prints from it). You get a TTL meter and aperture priority in the mix as well. All for something comparable to a Leica M3 w/CLA and a decent Summicron to go with it.

AND, one more option is to bide your time and get a Kiev 5 and have it CLA'd. The VF on the Kiev 5 is big and very bright. Maybe not as bright as my old Bessa R2, but certainly in the upper ranks of VF's. You get to use all your external mount Contax lenses (sadly, none of the wonderful internal mount 50s will work).

 

[Sonnar Brian]

The viewfinder on the R2C is going to be "challenged" by an 85mm F2 or 135mm F4 used wide-open. I thought about it. The Nikon S2 viewfinder is not as bright as a Leica, but is 1x magnification. I bought one off of Ebay that required the focus helical to be lubed, and found it was missing 1 of its original shims. I re-shimmed it to use the Contax lenses. As I already owned it, it was cheaper than an R2C. Of course you have to use an external finder with other-than 5cm lenses. But you have to do that with all of the Contax's anyway. At the price of the Orion adapters, you could buy a user Nikon SP (~$1,200) and re-shim it and buy an M2 or M3.

Nikkor 13.5cm F3.5 for "C"ontax, wide-open on the re-shimmed S2.
http://www.rangefinderforum.com/photopost/showphoto.php/photo/4530/size/big/sort/1/cat/539