I am sure they will get better.
It will I am sure be better than previous attempts.
I agree that a EVF may eventually become more practical for some or even most users. However, it can never really become better that a TTL optical viewfinder in showing you want the lens is seeing. With an optical TTL viewfinder you are actually looking through the lens. Even the best recordings of classical musical performance are never quite as good as being there.
Always? You certainly strain all credibility when you say 'always' (or 'never'). Considering that the human eye and brain have physical limits to their resolving power in spatial dimension, color, time, etc., I don't doubt that, someday, the EVF will be able to equal the human eye in powers. Add on to that magnification, greater flexibility in information display, night vision, infravision, ultravision, etc. most will consider it superior. Of course, maybe technology won't catch biology.
What is "ergonomically superior" to one person might not make so much difference to another. A photographer who becomes perfectly comfortable using the Dimage 7 and who can manipulate its controls quickly and easily is using equipment whose design is perfectly fine for him. A categorical statement about some other camera's being "ergonomically superior" in the abstract makes no sense.
I haven't seen anyone arguing -- yet, anyway -- that the image quality of the D7 equals or exceeds that of the D30. There haven't been enough hands-on uses of the thing yet. But what if a given scene, photographed with the D7, results in the photographer's getting a print whose level of noise is perfectly acceptable? Or in which the noise isn't visible?
This ignores certain practical situations -- for example, a photograph in which large blank areas of color (the sky, for instance) show noise, but areas containing a lot of detail do not. It is possible at times to select the blank areas and blur them or use other techniques to reduce noise without any seriously ill effect. You note that reducing noise in an image editor reduces detail or sharpness, but here again such a statement begs for proper qualification. You are considering these things in the abstract and without getting down to cases. But both God and the Devil are in the details , the specifics. It is hardly as if one photograph were every photograph...
That is some people's issue. And I don't know why they bother at this point. Almost nobody has seen the camera! There are no samples I have heard of that have been shot by photographers with known track records of excellent work, using the camera at its very best. Why do people continue to make categorical statements about its image quality, compared with other cameras' image quality, when they don't have any bloody evidence to support what they say? Who is to say that someone shooting in, say, D7 RAW format will not produce stunning pictures? Nobody can rationally make the claim either that the results will always be outstanding or that they never will.
Always? You certainly strain all credibility when you say 'always'
(or 'never'). Considering that the human eye and brain have
physical limits to their resolving power in spatial dimension,
color, time, etc., I don't doubt that, someday, the EVF will be
able to equal the human eye in powers. Add on to that
magnification, greater flexibility in information display, night
vision, infravision, ultravision, etc. most will consider it
superior. Of course, maybe technology won't catch biology.
Hell, and this is pie in the sky, in the future it might be that
veiwfinders of all sorts will be obsolete. We may literally see
through the camera through neural interfaces. Or we might not even
need cameras. Direct copy from mind to storage packaged with
Photoshop-Cerebellum Edition.
Mike
How do you know? How can you predict this?
How do you know?
]The optical viewfinder doesn't necessarily tell you what the
Well, there has to be a reason that all the SLRs seem to have evolved to a very similar design. It could be that the manufacturers have all just copied each other for marketing reasons. From personal experiance, I have to say that I find an 35mm SLR with a portrait grip to be the most comfortable type of camera I have held. This seems to be true of both Nikon and Canon. Owners of the Oly E-10 seem very enamoured about how it feels in the hand, describing it as "like a 35mm SLR". The D7 does appear to have been designed more for style than comfortable use. The C2100 on the other hand felt quite good in the hand when I tried one. Also it has a mode dial on the top with P/A/S/M positions. The D7 has its mode dial on the side and requires a two step operation to switch between exposure modes. Some people will just leave the camera in P mode, for them it will not matter.
Actually, I have, his name is David Littleboy. As regards hands on experiance, there is very little right now. However, some do exist and they do seem noisy. Probably no worse than the 3.3MP digicams though. BTW I have found that noise in my Oly C3000Z is not really visible in well exposed 4x6s shot at 100 ISO in good lighting conditions without too many shadows. OTOH where I have down sampled images for my rotating image screensaver, the high levels of noise in my Oly images compared with my D30 images are clearly visible.
Actually the noise levels on the C2100's 2.1MP sensor are lower than the noise levels on my C3000Z's 3.3MP sensor. The pixels are larger. The real issue though is your "certain image" qualifier. I would like most of my images to be noise free.
Timo has a very unfortunate style of posting. I suspect his posts of having a high amount of BS. I am not sure how much though.
Well I am not considering it in the abstract. I am considering it based on my own experiance.
What happens in detail areas is the noise tends to reduce image detail.
Even images with apparently continous tones actually have subtle detail in those tones. Noise reduction in an image definitely conflicts with the need to maintain a sharp image.
Well to be fair, most people who end up owning and using the D7 will not be "photographers with known track records of excellent work". Doubtless, one or two Jaja's will appear though. They are not the best way to compare cameras though. You really need to shoot the same subject off a tripod at the same effective focal length under the same lighting conditions. It is better that the lighting conditions be less than ideal.
Many test images shot with a D7 exist. They do appear noisy. Also, the CCD the Dimage uses is not revolutionary. It is a Sony CCD with approximately the same pixel size as the Sony CCD used in almost all the 3.3MP cameras. It is likely that its noise characteristics would be similar and indeed they appear to be. The real question is how noisy is Sony's 4MP CCD which packs more pixels onto a CCD the same size as Sony's 3.3MP CCD.
Well they are talking about digital cameras, not always the same thing.
By quality, I assume you are referring to resolution, and the ability to determine focus. Since you already mentioned brightness in low light situations as a possible plus for the EVF, is seems to me that resolution and possibly image size (does the viewfinder seem cramped) are the other important qualities of a viewfinder in terms of composing an image. One thing you will never be able to do with an optical viewfinder is digitally enhance the image to better determine focus, so as EVF technology improves, the EVF will win here as well. But what I really like about an EVF is the near real-time image feedback which will take a lot the guesswork out of exposure. Someone mentioned that the EVF on the D7 is a bit poky, but that will be less of a problem as the technology improves. Also, lets not forget that the EVF can easily provide all camera information while you are viewing the real-time images.
Want photographers with a high ratio of "excellent work". Look to the Nikon digi-back users. One thing I have noticed is photographers of excellent work are not in this or other forums, pushing their particular camera. They must be out taking photographs and improving their already high technique.
The "being there" is not what you see in the viewfinder. The "being there" is the print. The viewfinder only needs to show a facsimile of the image, as is the case with an EVF.
What are Nikon "digi-backs"? How do you know their "ratio"? Plenty of excellent photographers are active in these forums. Jaja is one of them.
Yeah, in the beginning, there were no EVFs. That's one reason. The SLR has continued to evolve without huge changes in the viewfinder concept (despite changes in the way it displays information, and despite eye-controlled focus mechanisms, and so forth). How would the manufacturers have put EVFs into SLRs that did not have imaging systems after the fashion of video cameras?
I have no idea what the designers at Minolta said to one another about this design, and neither does anyone else here. How the camera might appear to one person doesn't indicate either 1) how another user will experience it or 2) what Minolta's deisgners' own motives were.
Whether this proves to be a detriment depends entirely on how a given user feels about it once he has become accustomed to it. The D7's manual focus is on the lens barrel, where God intended it. Not so the C2100; manual focusing is a pain in the backside with the C2100 -- and I am used to using it. So which camera is better ergonomically? YMMV.
Some do, some don't.
Going completely off topic here (and I like the idea of the D7 EVF, although some threads have suggested a considerable lag when switching between different light conditions), being a big lover of classical music with hundreds of CDs, the experience of a live performance gives me a rush that recordings seldomly do.The optical viewfinder doesn't necessarily tell you what the
film will see. It only tells you what your eye sees through the
lens. Potentially an EVF can tell you what the CCD is seeing
and how it is reacting.
As for classical music some of us cynics consider the only advantage
of 'being there' that you get the distortions, echoes, audience
noise, and a seat that leaves you struggling for comfort after the
first hour (and if it's classical interminable ritual applause --
sometimes
twice for various reputable performers). Somewhat ironic that
you should prefer live to studio given the CCD noise mantra
autoresponder you appear to run in this forum
The real and measurable advantage of the optical VF is that it
cuts out the CCD to EVF lag.
--------------
Andrew
If you changed the viewfinder concept it wouldn't be an SLR anymore. I was referring to the general shape position of the control wheels.
Is that because of the control or the EVF. I found focusing my C3000Z via the LCD to be impractical. Then again, modern AF SLRs are also lacking in focusing aids. I find I get better results with AF. I find if it is too dark to AF, I really can't tell either. When do you find AF on the 2100 usefull.
Weight's a big part of ergonomic, so we'll have to agree to disagree here. The D7 fits in the hand just fine and has just the right amount of heft. None of the cameras under discussion here, by the way, allow someone with glasses to see the whole screen. (I walked into a store the other day (well, a few years ago) ready to buy an FM2 to replace my OM-1, but didn't for that reason.)
The pre-production model lens was good enough to allow it to beat all the SLRs in the vertical direction, and all but one in the horizontal, whatever lens you put on the SLRs. That's already been demonstrated.
It forces one to expose well and to increase the threshold when sharpening. Most sharpening functions don't have a threshold setting, and default to the equivalent of "0" in Photoshop LE. A threshold setting of 0 will agravate even the minimal noise in D1x/D30 images. But good photographers who use the D30/D1x expose well and don't sharpen in the camera. The good pro digital camera shots that I've seen are well exposed and only slightly sharpened.
Then you see the grain (35) or noise as funky and artistic. It always costs to push the envelope. Besides, good photographers use tripods, whatever the camera. To the best I can tell, good professional practice with SLRs (digital or otherwise) involves the kind of handling, exposure, and post processing required by the limitation of the D7.
Yup. But I'll be interested when they get the sensor size/pixel count up.
Now you have gone and put your foot in your mouth. The EFV is looking through the lens. It's already doing better than optical viewfinders in that it's showing you not only what the lens sees, but what your image recording system is seeing as well.
Nearly all the time. Given the (usual) accuracy of the C2100's automatic focusing, I have realized that my ancient hostility to auto-focus devices is, well, out of date (ancient, after all). The hostility might have been justified at one time, but it isn't justified any longer. It is likely that trying to focus manually would in most cases take me longer than it would for the camera to focus automatically -- assuming sufficient vertical detail in the subject-matter. This is definitely true with the higher-end cameras (with abject apologies to Timo, of course, for having said this ). I have seen how fast the D30 focuses. In a word: wow. There's no way that, given my eyesight, I would be able to focus that quickly.
The Nikon F5 is quite good in this regard.
Well, you have a good point but full frame will be here eventually. Those lenses will still be usable.
The EVF is certainly interesting. Its tilt mechanism could be quite usefull. How well it works in practise though is the biggest question with this camera. The E-10's beam splitter makes its viewfinder a bit dim. For the SLRs it depends on the lens.
Do you have a url to the tests. The Minolta lens does look pretty good. Lens test charts do not typically show the effects of noise or chromatic abberations though.
Actually I almost always use a 0 threshold and 0.2 radius for my low ISO D30 images. I generally sharpen to about 400%-700%. I shoot raw and do not sharpen when generating the Tiff. I try to avoid JPEG when possible.
Noise is unfortunately often less artistic looking than film grain.
Well they could put the current SLR sensors into a camera the size of the S85, or perhaps the size of a Leica, and either use custom lenses or perhaps a Leica screw mount. A large sensor compact camera would be very intersting. It wouldn't be cheap though. The D30 sensor apparently costs about $1400.
