Camera Talk

The Kodak Signet 35 is a cute little rangefinder with a couple of shortcomings. One is a shutter that is a bit delicate and often needs a lot of attention to coax back to life.

The other is the rangefinder. On some cameras, you'll find that the rangefinder patch (a triangle) is no longer visible, turning your Signet 35 into a scale-focus camera.

What I found is that this can sometimes be corrected by using a piece of blank 35mm color negative that has been processed.

This page on my site shows you how to make the rangefinder patch visible. I would say that it took me about 30 minutes.

To get to the point, you insert a small rectangle of the 35mm color negative in front of the main viewing window.

I've tried the old black sharpie method before, but this does look better.

There are some beautiful sheets of 50/50 beam splitter going cheap here:
http://www.surplusshed.com/pages/item/l14550.html

Nice purple colour.

That's a real good price. And I have a couple of cameras that need some new semi-reflective mirrors. As I recall, the loss of the coating is a weakness of the Voigtlander Vito C (and variants).

The Kodak Signet must have sold well. Just the other day I was clearing out files and ran across a letter I wrote in about 1990 to a dealer in New York State giving a rundown of the four Signets I was selling to him. I had picked these up at church bazaars and the like so they were plentiful. I liked the pictures the Signet made and the size of the camera; the one that I found rattling around the bottom of a box worked the best as I recall. When the dealer advertised that he was looking for Signets, I sold them all to him for a decent price. Do you know of any other camera that could be mistaken for a Kodak Signet just by the looks? I've never seen anything that looked quite like it.