Should our viewfinders be cleaned ?

R

ruben

Guest
Dear Friends,

A few days ago I attended a wedding with my Olympus 35SP, to make some additional pics to those of the contracted photographer. After two rolls of film my right eye was quite tired, as in many situations I found it quite hard to focus.

The place was rather dim, not as a night club of course, but not as a brightly lighted expensive saloon. Secondly, I was mostly following a lot of action, not still people, and this is a harder job for manual focusing.

But a the greatest part of the problem was the light yellowish patch of the Olympus RF. As many rangefinders from the 70's, in contrast to the old Soviet Kievs and Feds, the viewfinder window of the Oly is much brighter, but the yellow patch is more de-colorated, less visible, and therefore giving less contrast at the viewfinder window.

Therefore I submmited a question about it to the Oly forum of Photonet and got the recommendation of a) opening the camera and cleaning the viewfinder, and if it doesn't help, then b) to attach a colored celluloid piece to either the rangefinder window or the viewfinder window, according to my findings.

Obviously, before surgery, I tried the colored celluloid on the Oly, and indeed it worked good to attach the celluloid to the viewfinder window. But the viewfinder window went not only colored but dimmer as well. As for the annoying celluloid's color tone I solved it theoretically by 'replacing' it with a polarizer filter. But by this way I end with a Kiev-like viewfinder dim window.

From the whole experience and test I conclude the following and post it as questions:

a) what makes focusing easier is the CONTRAST level between viewfinder and rangefinder: for a bright viewfinder a dark rangefinder, for a dimm viewfinder a bright rangefinder.

a1) the optimal to me is a bright viewfinder window with a dark yellow patch.

b) assuming that the yellow patches in Soviet cameras became lighter or less colorated with time, isn't precisely their dim viewfinder windows an advantage for easy focusing ? (As crazy as it may sound, there is much more eye relief when focusing with a Kiev from the 50's than with an Oly from the 70's.)

c) from here, I should not clean the viewfinder window of the Oly because then, by making it brighter, I will diminish even more its contrast with the de-colorated yellow patch.


I gess I am wrong. Advisory help will be much appreciated.

Kindly,

Ruben
 
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I've always found that cleaning the viewfinders of my seventies rangefinders made focusing much easier. I think my Kiev is easy to focus because of its wide base not its dimness.
 
Every rangefinder I have gotten I have cleaned the viewfinder and exclaimed WOW after looking thru it after cleaning. You have several surfaces of glass that usually gets hazy and
you lose contrast and brightness...the dirty viewfinders have a lot of flare in them too.
 
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