Bill Ely said:
Could any of you historians out there provide a brief background as to why there was such an abandonment of the rangefinder in favor of SLR cameras in the late 1950s/early 1960s?
Bill Ely
Bill,
in general all camera designs are a compromise and have limitations but RF cameras have more limitations than SLRs seen from an average pros POV. The total shift to SLR proofs it.
I doubt btw that any of them bought an SLR to look cool, that’s an amateur attitude.
What I haven’t seen mentioned here is the hassle of focusing with external finders for wides and super wides and their parallax prob, which counts at least as much as the prob with the tele lenses longer than 90mm and the lack of macro.
Not everybody finds Visoflex great .
🙂
Also things like interchangeable finders and screens, for example using a grid on the screen for controlling converging lines and the easy use of pol filters. Zooms suddenly got possible and were later an important part of the SLR concept.
Most of all I think the sensation of looking TTL and the WYSIWYG effect contributed to the shift to SLR, though the finders in those days were partly terrible dark and grainy, no Fresnel, metering stopped down, poor focussing aids. Nonetheless the RF photogs are a minority today also because the very most people find it easier to compose on a SLR screen than with the help of bright lines.
And when the screens got brighter and less grainy the SLRs could be used in low light or in the dark too and at the latest when they got as small as a Oly OM or a Pentax the RF concept was out of biz.
Excepted some amateur aficionados and pros who like the RF enuff to use it whenever it has clear advantages compared to the SLR . Most of them use SLR parallel tho, for the mentioned reasons.
bertram
