D5100 LCD unusable for manual shooting...should I care?

Graystar wrote:

The vast majority of P&S cameras don't have flip out screens. They're meant to be held out in front of your face, but they're much lighter than a DSLR. The usage of articulated monitors that I hear of most often is macro work.

On the D3 and D3s, the live histogram is only available in "tripod" mode, which is also limited to contrast-detect AF. In "hand-held" mode, where phase-detect AF is used, there's no live histogram. Since the Live View histogram has nothing to do with the focus method, I'm guessing that this was done in realization that no one is going to hold up a heavy camera and lens steady enough to have a stable histogram...so why block the image with a useless histogram?

The D800 does away with the tripod mode and does have a live histogram when you enable exposure preview. But then again it also gained AutoISO by focal length...another practically useless feature that reviewers such as DPReview liked to continuously harp was missing (while never complaining about Canon and other not having a Minimum Shutter Speed setting...at least not until recently. Seems like they finally figured out that Nikon's AutoISO had it right all along.) So I just write those off as catering to a vocal minority.

And for anyone who thinks that using an LCD will help with the tricky exposure and get what you want...look at the following image. The squares labeled A and B are the same shade of gray (RGB 120, 120, 120.)

That's called Color Constancy, just one of several functions of human Visual Perception that throws a wrench into this idea of using the LCD to set exposure. It's the reason why people can't get the LCD image to look like the live scene...they don't realize that the LCD image DOES look like the live scene...its their eyes that's changing the scene.

No live histogram is going to help with that.

Checkershadow Illusion