Brilliant Finder

The Mercury Brilliant Finder is a big, bright, top-view ("waist-level") viewfinder available for 6x6 or MF3D photography. Designed for the Mercury Stereo Hood Finder system, it can mount on any Mercury Stereo hood (for minimum vertical paralax) or on any cold shoe.

The Brilliant Finder is much brighter than waist-level finders or ground glass!

This finder comes with three slide-in masks for use with different focal length lenses.  The masks add small white borders around the Brilliant Finder's image, indicating the exact edges of the frame. Thus even if you don't see the entire image at a time, you can frame up perfectly, and a tiny camera movement can reveal what is on the edge of your frame if important.

The Brilliant Finder compliments our standard viewfinders and our Videofinder, all of which work best at wider focal lengths.  The Brilliant Finder works best at longer focal lengths. Its included masks are the following:

65mm: the critical center of the image is displayed, with significant edges not displayed.

80mm: Most of the image id displayed, with smaller left and right edges not displayed.

100/105mm: Tiny edges aren't displayed, but the vast majority of the image is.  This is the optimal focal length for this finder.

The Brilliant Finder operates like the small brilliant finders on old folding cameras, but is significantly larger.