The Canon VT is a
rangefinder camera released by
Canon in 1956. Until then, Canon had a history of making slightly modified
Leica
Leica Camera AG () is a German company that manufactures cameras, optical lenses, photographic lenses, binoculars, rifle scopes and microscopes. The company was founded by Ernst Leitz in 1869 (Ernst Leitz Wetzlar), in Wetzlar, Germany.
...
copies. The release of the VT showed for the first time that Canon could be a leader in 35mm rangefinder design.
Canon kept the
Leica screw mount
The M39 lens mount is a screw thread mounting system for attaching lenses to 35 mm cameras, primarily rangefinder (RF) Leicas. It is also the most common mount for Photographic enlarger lenses.
True Leica Thread-Mount (LTM) is 39 mm in ...
on the VT, and little else. They changed the
film advance from a top-mounted knob to a bottom-mounted trigger. The tripod socket was moved to mount a trigger wind grip. They added a swing-open back making the camera easier to load than previous bottom loading Canons.
The VT had a
focal-plane shutter with a cloth curtain; shutter speeds were from 1s to 1/1000, plus T and B. Available Canon lenses ranged from 25mm to 800mm, with some as fast as f/1.2. FP, M, and X flash synchronisation was supported.
It had a three-position
viewfinder with rotating prisms, which could be set to 35mm, 50mm and RF. In the RF setting,
accessory shoe-mounted viewfinders with automatic
parallax
Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines. Due to foreshortening, nearby objects ...
correction would be used.
See also
*
Canon 39mm screw lenses
Canon or Canons may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* Canon (fiction), the conceptual material accepted as official in a fictional universe by its fan base
* Literary canon, an accepted body of works considered as high culture
** Western can ...
External links
* Cameraquest'
Canon VT page*
in a Leica-history site
with discussion of the VT, by Davidde Stella. (Via Wayback, therefore slow. Choice of this particular Wayback image is arbitrary. The original URL is
http://www.davidde.com/articles/canon5012.html .)
Canon VTa
Sylvain Halgand's www.collection-appareils.fr
{{From Camerapedia, Canon VT, 4 August 2007
Canon rangefinder cameras