I just bought a 24mm asph len with matching leica viewfinder.The question is ,what is the 5 small little lines near the top of viewfinder screen.I assume we suppose to frame the view within the boundary of the line.If anybody guide me about that lines.Thank raymond teng

-- raymond teng (rteng@yahoo.com), October 16, 2001

Answers

those should correspond to the close focusing range fo that lens, is the limit of your frame when you´re at the closest focusing range, unfortunately there is not marks for below.

-- r watson (al1231234@hotmail.com), October 16, 2001.

Raymond: Rwatson is basically correct, but I'll expand a bit. The regular solid silver frame shows the field of view for subjects near infinity. The five dashes show where the top of the picture will be when focused at closest focus (.7 meters - 27 inches). They are there to keep you from cutting off the tops of people's heads.

There are two reasons for the change in framing with distance.

1) parallax. The finder is 2 inches higher than the lens. At 10 feet this is insignificant, but at 2 feet the lens and finder see things differently and the dotted lines show the difference (roughly).

2) ALL lenses project a slightly bigger image (and crop more) the closer they are focused, because the glass has moved further away from the film (just as moving a slide projector further away from the wall makes the projected image bigger).

The bottom of the frame doesn't change enough to need marks because LOOKING DOWN towards the bottom of the subject the lens and finder are more in alignment (in fact the lens is SO aligned with the viewfinder that it actually juts into the edge of the frame). So there is almost no parallax and the 'normal' frame line is more or less accurate.

-- Andy Piper (apidens@denver.infi.net), October 17, 2001.

To add a bit more clarification to Andy's answer... To focus a lens closer you move it forward or away from the film plane -- this also makes the lens longer, thus increasing its focal-length. Longer focal- length equal less angle of view, hence the need for tighter framelines in a finder. We are only talking a few mm, but it is enough to significantly alter the angle of view.

This is the precise reason that the RF framelines in our Leicas are "off" when we focus at infinity, and we get more stuff in the image than was covered in the frame, yet when we focus very close, we don't always get everything we remember seeing. I believe the Leica's RF framelines are calibrated to be accurate at 3 meters, thus they'll be too tight when the subject is closer than that, and too loose when the subject is further away...

-- Jack Flesher (jbflesher@msn.com), October 17, 2001.