Lensless camera - What would you see?

[Math]

I recently went through my camera collection to clean up and throw things out, and found an old rather crappy s8 camera - Lancia EM-52. Instead of throwing it out, I thought it'd be fun to open it up and see how it runs, and if possible, replace the lens with a C lens mount so I would be able to use exchangeable lenses.

The lens was very easy to remove (it just unscrews), and when I have the whole lens off I can see the gelatin filters, but not much further, so I can't see inside..
However, when I view through the viewfinder, I can still see an image! This is a reflex viewfinder, so this suprised me. The diopter was set correctly before. Can it be that there is still a lens inside? (Through the viewfinder I get something that looks like 20mm, give or take) Or is it that the viewfinder system just works in an odd way? (I still don't really know how it works, I'm used to groundglass like on SLRs!)

[Mitch Perkins]

The lens was very easy to remove (it just unscrews), and when I have the whole lens off I can see the gelatin filters, but not much further, so I can't see inside..
However, when I view through the viewfinder, I can still see an image!

similar experience w/nizo - took the lens off and was surprised to see thru the vf what looked to be an image that would come out nicely - resultant footage was severely out of focus. your camera may be different; perhaps sacrifice a few inches to a test...

[CineGuerrilha]

if u put a cap and pierce it with a needle u may have a pinhole, but the amount of light necessary to expose the film will be prohibitive

[Mitch Perkins]

if u put a cap and pierce it with a needle u may have a pinhole, but the amount of light necessary to expose the film will be prohibitive

Wow what a neat idea!

Mitch

[audadvnc]

Yeah, I think you'd be shooting about 1 frame per minute with a pinhole lens, which might be good for those time delay shots.

[Jim Carlile]

You're looking through the eypiece onto a mirror that is reflecting whatever is coming through the lens opening, lens or no lens.

remember, the light path from opening to eyepiece is complicated. If it weren't, you'd be seeing everything inverted-- upside down and reversed. That's how lenses capture their image. In fact, movie cameras film everything inverted.