The Mighty Canon P -- contrasted with M7

[richard_l]

I'm not in the habit of setting the dial to "B", but something tells me that maybe, just maybe some users don't understand the basic principle of "shutter cocked=meter on", and if you just like to keep your finger pressing on the shutter, well, that's not the camera's fault at all.

Also, if it is put into a camera bag in which there is any pressure on the shutter button, the meter may be activated unless it is turned off. That's what was happening to a lot of people during the years of M6 and M6TTL production. Many people were wrongly assuming that the cameras were at fault. My M6 batteries have never given out, but I replace them about every three years anyhow.

Richard

 

[harry01562]

T shirts for the working class

T shirts for the working class

We need a line of T-Shirts.

Canon P
Leica M3
Nikon SP
And the Canon 7 with 50mm F0.95 labeled "Size Counts in the Dark".

Yes... I'd like one of each of the Canon's... and a plug for RFF above the pic and the name of the camera under... tasteful, and simple, like the P

And Jim, you had a poor example of the P. Mine is as smooth as any camera I've used (including older Leica), and the viewfinder is clear. It's a very fine build quality, probably better than the later 7's, and a nice handfull.

Harry

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

My lowly Yugo has had the SAME single tank of gas for the entire 1 month I've had filled. Contrast that with the THREE tanks of gas my Mercedes has gone through in ONE damn months. Ugh.

So...contrasting: german cameras eat more film than yugoslavian cameras? Could you even fit a roll of 35mm film into the yugo camera? If it crashed, would the film inside survive? I think the japanese and german cameras have that one licked, I don't know about the yugo cameras...

 

[Mackinaw]

Well, I'm not anti-Canon P but, to me, when you're talking rangefinders, viewfinder is everything and here's where the P stumbles. I readily admit that I'm thoroughly spoiled by the viewfinder/rangefinder in my MP which, fair or not, is my new standard.

If I was in the market for another vintage classic Canon rangefinder (I'm not....if anything my next foray into classic cameradom will be a Nikon SP) I'd still opt for another L1 over a P, but that's just me.

Jim Bielecki

 

[Sonnar Brian]

The viewfinder of the VI-T compares well with the SP; both are 1x and have parallax corrected lines. The SP uses projected lines, the VI-T uses etched lines. The 1.5x of the VI-T works well with 135mm lenses, but the red framelines of the SP for 135mm stand out. The Nikon S3 finder is probably closer to the Canon P.

The Canon 7 finder also compares well with the SP, and the camera cost 1/10th as much. The SP looks cooler. A Nikkor F1.1 lens will run 5x the cost of the 50mm F0.95. The L1 finder is the same as the V-T, which on mine is crystal clear. The 1.5x finder is terrific, and I've used it with the 200mm F4.5 Komura RF coupled Telephoto.

 

[simonankor]

As far as finders go, I've played with a lot of Leica Ms recently, and still come away feeling more comfortable with my P... Go figure!

Believe it or not, I think the soft-edged rangefinder patch makes it easier for me to focus without thinking. It seems to just become part of my vision (I shoot with both eyes open). No problems with framelines for me, but then I normally just use the 50mm. When I have used my C/V 35mm on the P body, I've had no problems with the "relaxed awareness" technique mentioned earlier in this thread.

The P is definitely my favourite shooter for 35mm and 50mm.

I just bought a Nikon FE for anything longer 😉

 

[back alley]

simon, if you have the opportunity to get a 100/3.5 i would say to pick it up. they are tiny and sharp and you could store it in your jeans pocket when out for walk.

jjoe

 

[jlw]

Believe it or not, I think the soft-edged rangefinder patch makes it easier for me to focus without thinking. It seems to just become part of my vision (I shoot with both eyes open).

I believe it; I've gone both ways on this subject myself.

When I first got out of Leica Ms and went over to Canon, one thing I liked was the soft-edged RF patch. It seemed to make composition easier, because it didn't add a discrete, distracting shape in the middle of the finder field.

(We might resort to digi-lingo to describe the soft-edged patch as a positive feature -- we could say that the RF patch is "antialiased into the background layer.")

Since I started using Bessas, though, I've found the sharp-edged patch more and more useful. Sometimes it's a bit difficult just to find the soft-edged patch against a cluttered background; the fact that the sharp-edged patch is easier to see, which is a distracting disadvantage in some kinds of photography, becomes an advantage here.

Yet more evidence that one man's meat is another man's poison -- or sometimes, the same man's, under different circumstances...

 

[djon]

Joe, put a set of bright lines around that "P" ... the outside line should be a little fuzzy 😉

My P finders are a little hazy in extremely bright light...not bad, however, for $300 cameras and a LOT better than most Leicas in two respects (mechanical ruggedness, hinge back). Haze and soft rangefinder patch were both improved a great deal in one of my Ps simply by opening the rear viewfinder window and cleaning the glass with water/photoflo/lens cleaning tissue. These are, after all, very old cameras.

The shocking thing is that there are so many reports of faulty NEW Leicas. Not something I would expect for $3000! It's also shocking that CV so regularly is reported to ship cameras with faulty rangefinders...I'd have expected better of them, since most Asian manufacturers are so good at quality control.

Leica has forever missed the boat with M design, never rising significantly above Canon P...unfortunately Canon abandoned RFDRs, devoting themselves to history's best SLRs (F1) and then history's best (so far) DSLRs. 😡

 

[back alley]

i can only imagine what my world would be like if canon had continued to make rangefinder cameras.

or if they were to make another...

joe

 

[jlw]

i can only imagine what my world would be like if canon had continued to make rangefinder cameras.

or if they were to make another...

joe

My world would have a lot less cash in it, that's for sure...

 

[Mackinaw]

Bob Shell (Canon Compendium) mentioned on another list I'm on, that Canon, a few years back, had designed a new rangefinder camera and lenses to counter Nikon's just rereleased S3, but dropped the idea of producing both when the digital craze broke. Too bad!

Jm Bielecki

 

[back alley]

oh that hurts to hear!

canon, where are you?

 

[jlw]

To amplify a bit on the idea of Canon making another RF camera, here's my "doomsday scenario":

We know that Canon's EOS SLR lenses have an all-electronic mount. We also know that many SLR makers now build their lenses with a distance encoder that can tell the camera body the focusing distance; generally this is used mostly for flash metering. So...

• Suppose Canon were to make a series of EOS-mount lenses with very accurate distance encoding? This easily could be tailored to the individual lens by measuring values on an automated test rig and burning them onto a ROM chip, as Contax did with G lenses.
• Then further suppose that Canon designed a camera body having an optical rangefinder controlled not by a cam, but by a high-precision stepper motor in the camera body?... this stepper motor controlled by signals from the distance encoder in the lens. Presto -- an all-electronic RF camera! No more need for expensive individually-machined coupling cams in the lenses, and the rangefinder could be self-calibrating.
• And, the same lenses would be fully usable on any EOS SLR body, film or digital.
• And, let's suppose that Canon took advantage of the SLR lens' greater back focus to design their RF camera so that the EOS coupler could be removed, leaving behind a mount that would accept conventional M-mount lenses...? (It would be easy -- just require a ring of the right thickness with an EOS female mount on one end, an M male mount on the other, and some electrical contacts to carry the encoder signals to the body.)
• Finally, suppose that Canon designed this RF camera to be made in both a film version and a digital version incorporating their latest full-35mm-area sensor...?

See why I call this the "doomsday scenario"? Epson would be doomed... the putative "Digital M" Leica would be doomed... and, especially, our bank accounts would be doomed! Right?

 

[djon]

The new Sony R1 may turn out to be a credible alternative to Canon 20D (better resolution...10MP/APS...Zeiss optics)...wouldn't take much redesign to introduce a vario-elmar sort of version and a stepped optical viewfinder if there really was a market.

 

[jlw]

I dunno -- the Sony's lens and sensor might be a good alternative for most people most of the time, but I suspect that adding an optical RF to an all-in-one camera might be enough of a technical hurdle to push the price up to the point that people would expect lens interchangeability.

After all, a lot of the appeal of the notion of a "digital M" (or, in keeping with the original thrust of this thread, a "digital P") is the ability to use classic lenses the user already owns.

 

[StuartR]

But then you would have a giant canon RF right? The EOS mount is very large compared to the LTM or M mount. If you have an eos mount, then your minimum lens diameter would be the same size of the mount, which is what? A 58mm filter ring? I did not really follow the rest or your argument, but it seems like it would end up as a very large rangefinder, when one of the biggest advantages of RF's is that they are small...

 

[jlw]

You've got a Fuji G690 in your avatar, and you're complaining about the size of the EOS lens mount?!?

Yeah, admittedly, the camera body -- or at least the lens mount part of it -- would have to be larger than the average M-mount camera. But considering the huge cameras photographers seem willing to lug around, I doubt that would be a significant drawback. The biggest advantage of RFs is that they have a rangefinder, and a technologically advanced rangefinder camera that could use a wider choice of lenses would have enough benefits that I'll bet a lot of people would overlook a slight increase in size.

 

[Doug]

For a modern technologically advanced "rangefinder" camera with 2-way communication between body and lens, we have as an example the Kyocera Contax G series. Pretty compact gear, too. Of course, no other camera shares a compatible lens mount.... 🙁

 

[jlw]

For a modern technologically advanced "rangefinder" camera with 2-way communication between body and lens, we have as an example the Kyocera Contax G series. Pretty compact gear, too. Of course, no other camera shares a compatible lens mount.... 🙁

Yeah, but I think the downfall of the Gs was that they aren't really rangefinder cameras. The lack of visual confirmation that the camera had focused on what you intended was a psychological barrier that a lot of people never quite got over.

I owned a G1 and a G2, liked them a lot, and operated a website about them (the Contax G User Pages) for several years -- but I think the marketplace showed us that the approach they took wouldn't be viable for another manufacturer to continue.