Solved my M3's viewfinder woes!

[kchoquette]

Made a great little 35mm viewfinder for my Leica out of some old Kodak disposables. A buddy of mine works at CVS and was able to save me a few to work on.

About one good gash in my middle-finger and 45 minutes later, I’ve got the most minimalist viewfinder ever! Covers the range remarkably, can't wait to check out this roll I've got sitting in there.

 

[kokoshawnuff]

Very clever. I'm curious to find out how accurate your framing is on that roll...

 

[kchoquette]

I'm fairly sure it's not going to be perfect, parallax considered. But I think it'll definitely do a decent enough job. And boy, is it ever small!

 

[paradoxbox]

Could you share which particular camera you found that has that viewfinder?

The only ones I can find are 28 or 38 or 42mm.

 

[zuiko85]

I have often thought that if some manufacturer of those plastic "art" cameras made a series of cheap plastic viewfinders for 21, 28, 35, 50, 90mm lenses to sell for $10 each they could sell a boat load of them. I'm sick to death of external finders with jacked up prices Leica and CV and Zeiss charge to pad the profit margins of their cameras. Why should a finder, with no mechanical internals, often in a plastic mount, cost as much a some of the lenses sell for used?

And, like parsdoxbox, I'd like to know which Kodak that came out of. My thought is that with a 28mm lens they would set the VF to show about 35mm FOV so the user would not be surprised by cut off feet or heads in their snapshots.