A lot of inexpensive photo exposure meters are largely just the same; this one is very different. I've never seen one like it.

This is a combination rangefinder and exposure calculator. At the time it was made, only expensive, professional cameras had built-in rangefinders but none had meters. This was a gadget which suggested it could do both for little money.

It's really quite unusual. This unit has instructions because you'd never figure it out. But here are the basics: for rangefinding, you hold this thing 13 1/2 inches away from your eye (you can set the neck-strap so that it places the meter at the proper distance), then frame your subject's face in the window. There is a slide, so you frame the face between the model's hairline and chin--then you can read the distance. For non-human subjects you need to use a special target (or anything that's the proper length).

For metering, there's an curved line of dots, each with a progressively darker neutral density filter. The slide has holes, so that as you pull the slide down, the dot would let light through. So one aims this at your subject and adjust the slide until you see which dot is just barely visible. Then you read the ƒ/stop in the window above (the slide will be on it).

Included: flash calculator, which is a logical extension of knowing the distance. Flash exposure is determined by distance, film speed and which flash bulb you're using. Since this thing tells you the distance, you look up the bulb value form a table on the back of it, then you can calculate exposure with the dial in front.

The above text was translated from Russian Polish and other languages. The meter was made and sold primarily in the U.S.A.

The author of this blog did not claim everything worked very accurately, but it's clever.

 Utilitron may have been a distributor. Nothing useful found about the company, and I have not been able to find a patent. 

This is one of the few meters of this era which is still worth money. The very few occasions I've seen them on eBay they've been fetching around $75 - $100 each. Considering that's it's an inexpensive gadget, not an actual electro-mechanical meter, that's very unusual. Compare that to my Amerline or a Leudi, which are about the same age—both of those meters are worth about $5-$10 each on a good day

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