My advice is that you not waste your time trying to get the Sputnik's finder lens calibrated. That "finder" is not well enough designed and implemented to yield good results no matter how much time you devote to this task. Just use the finder to give you an idea of what your composition looks like, and use hyperfocal focusing to get your images as sharp as possible.

Before I finally sprung for a TL-120 I got lots of nice images with various Sputniks. The approach that worked for me was to calibrate the taking lenses to be in sharp matched focus at the f22 hyperfocal distance (I believe that was about 12 feet.) I'd remove the lens gears, open the camera up, set the shutter open and put a piece of frosted tape on the film plane (ground glass would be even better if available.) I'd put the camera on a tripod 12 feet from a large computer monitor displaying a grid and use loupes to focus the taking lenses, then put the gears back on and mark the location. Once I had the hyperfocal point in focus I used it for most of my shooting, only shot at f22 and got very nice results. The Sputnik's optics are so poorly designed that when the focus is matched at one point it will probably be mismatched at another one. This is why you want to calibrate the point you're going to use most often. Why calibrate infinity when you're never going to shoot with the lenses focused there?

Prior to this I spent years trying to use the finder to focus the thing and I'll I got for my trouble was piles of out of focus images.

Jim Harp

I agree with most of what Jim says. I would suggest going through the exercise and spend as much time as you want tweaking whatever you feel needs it, if for no other purpose than to learn the camera.

I spent some tedious time working on a Sputnik and actually had it yield what I considered acceptable results (focus that was matched and reasonably sharp) at f-stops of 8 and even 5.6. The time I spent getting it there was worth the effort.

Having said that, for those wide apertures where focus became more important, I don't think I ever used the Sputnik's view finder to determine distance to the subject. I've always used a separate range finder for that and then set the Sputnik's focus to that distance.

--- In MF3D-group@yahoogroups.com, "jamesbharp" wrote:
>
> My advice is that you not waste your time trying to get the Sputnik's finder lens calibrated. That "finder" is not well enough designed and implemented to yield good results no matter how much time you devote to this task. Just use the finder to give you an idea of what your composition looks like, and use hyperfocal focusing to get your images as sharp as possible.
>
> Before I finally sprung for a TL-120 I got lots of nice images with various Sputniks. The approach that worked for me was to calibrate the taking lenses to be in sharp matched focus at the f22 hyperfocal distance (I believe that was about 12 feet.) I'd remove the lens gears, open the camera up, set the shutter open and put a piece of frosted tape on the film plane (ground glass would be even better if available.) I'd put the camera on a tripod 12 feet from a large computer monitor displaying a grid and use loupes to focus the taking lenses, then put the gears back on and mark the location. Once I had the hyperfocal point in focus I used it for most of my shooting, only shot at f22 and got very nice results. The Sputnik's optics are so poorly designed that when the focus is matched at one point it will probably be mismatched at another one. This is why you want to calibrate the point you're going to use most often. Why calibrate infinity when you're never going to shoot with the lenses focused there?
>
> Prior to this I spent years trying to use the finder to focus the thing and I'll I got for my trouble was piles of out of focus images.
>
> Jim Harp
>

Edwin Baskin wrote:

> I spent some tedious time working on a Sputnik and actually had it yield what I considered acceptable results (focus that was matched and reasonably sharp) at f-stops of 8 and even 5.6. The time I spent getting it there was worth the effort.
>

.
Although I may have used those f/stops on my Sputnik when desperate,
I tried to keep it stopped down fully as much as possible to increase
probability that all would be in focus wherever that might be. :-)

Mike K.

Michael Kersenbrock wrote:

>
> Although I may have used those f/stops on my Sputnik when desperate,
> I tried to keep it stopped down fully as much as possible to increase
> probability that all would be in focus wherever that might be. :-)

Yep. I've been that desperate, photographing my step daughter on stage, indoors, where flash photography was not allowed.

There's so much advice out there to always use f/16 or f/22 that I feel it's necessary to speak up every once in a while and vouch for the fact that good results can be obtained at f/8 or f/5.6 if you have the patience to work on it.