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Imagine a DSLR with MLU & life preview.....

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Ralf B

Ralf B

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Take the sensor processing technology that drives the EVF in the much discussed Sony DSC-R1 and assume that DSLR's will still be built with OVF's and mirrors in the light path to make use of all the glass designed for them and their film ancestors, i.e. for the long distance between last lense element and the sensor (film).

we would get:
  • OVF: delay free, fast AF, ...well, just as now (hopefully brighter one day...)
  • EVF (on back LCD) in case of Mirror Lock Up after framing the shot through OVF for timing the final shot
Any thoughts?
--
Show me an affordable beamer with slide film resolution and I am sold....

Ralf
 
Ralf Bliesener said:
Take the sensor processing technology that drives the EVF in the
much discussed Sony DSC-R1 and assume that DSLR's will still be
built with OVF's and mirrors in the light path to make use of all
the glass designed for them and their film ancestors, i.e. for the
long distance between last lense element and the sensor (film).
Click to expand...
Sounds easy, but there's quirks and hard stuff involved. Flipping up the mirror eats power with most dSLRs. The sensor may not have the right access lines to get stuff off the sensor fast enough. The sensor may not be designed to be on constantly like that and may result in noisy images.

The problem is, they run the risk of a not-entirely-functional-EVF/MLU mode backfiring in reviews. "The camera will ONLY preview for 30 seconds! What a horible camera!" "We tested using EVF/MLU mode because that was what we were comfortable with. In all of our tests, focused much slower than any other dSLR." and so on....
 
wirehead and ricardo.

Does not look like an urgently wanted feature, and agree, marketing this could really get tough. Avoid EVF and life preview as terminology, then?

I actually saw this idea addressing several complaints on how MLU is available in most of todays DSLR's (if at all) as a two second mirror prefire and then shutter release, so whatever you shoot is partly timing luck. some ol' school guys hinted at real MLU being something they wanted availble independently from actual shutter release.

Guess that benefit comes at too high implementation and marketing efforts...
--
Show me an affordable beamer with slide film resolution and I am sold....

Ralf
 
Mike,

please see my profile for my fr... P&S. Your reply shows that choosing the term "life preview" for the SLR and DSLR Mirror Lock Up function enhancement I was thinking of is not a good idea.

Sorry for having misguided you by the wording. Another poster in this thread already mentioned the same problem with a somewhat less exited tone in his post.

Happy Shooting.

--
Show me an affordable beamer with slide film resolution and I am sold....

Ralf
 
Agree, Palmwestphoto,
AF is gone, too, unless additional sensor - too much hassle.

MLU gets rid of (D)SLR mirror slap - and also of your OVF. So how do you time the shot?
One of your pics as example:

Timing put the dynamic element - the bird - into the right spot in this otherwise static landscape picture.

Having control of timing the shot during MLU was what i had in mind. So having the LCD indicate what is going on in the framed area and choosing when to realease the shutter was the goal. I am convinced now that it is too much of a design effort for the little benefit. Actually, also the mechanic shutter - opened for "preview" -would have to close and open back up for the exposure ... just forget the idea.

The manufacturers should simply split the "mirror up" from the shutter release and give us timing control.

Thanks to all for the feedback.

--
Show me an affordable beamer with slide film resolution and I am sold....
Ralf
 
Well, it depends on what you shoot. To me, this kind of shooting is obviously done on a tripod, but also it's usually for stuff like stars, or time lapse and such. These are the kinds of things you set up and leave till the time comes.

Most often even when something action will come into play, you would have set the camera up and no when you need to shot without looking though. "have your marks" if you will.

Also for a lot of these kinds of shots I set them up without really looking through the view finder, since it's to dark to see anyways. I just guess the field of view, use site-lines to get the angles, set the focus to infinity, and wait to take the shot, like a shooting star.
 
Large sensor require power and this will be the key issue. But as a side show, if the Live preview are used with caution and the OVF is the primary framing. I do not see a reason why it would not work.

--
Franka
 
(can't use the s word here)
Franka T.L. said:
Large sensor require power and this will be the key issue. But as a
side show, if the Live preview are used with caution and the OVF is
the primary framing. I do not see a reason why it would not work.
Click to expand...
It has been already said -- large sensors do not use more power than ca. 20-30 mW.
 
why do you need a live EVF preview or LCD preview,, especially when the optical viewfinder in DSLRs are already live previews of what is actually being seen and not some second generation electron conversion. I think this nonesense of a live preview with dslrs is ridiculous. The optical view finder of the DSLR is better than any energy, make shift EVF or LCD live preview which is good with small P&S cameras due to the small size and underwatre photography. But for most purposes, the traditoinal SLR viewfinder is a better way to go. I do not want an SLR with EVF or live preview when I have a better more natural alternative.
 
Leon Wittwer said:
Interestingly, even after producing the E10 and E20, Oly abandoned
using the live preview in favor of a mirror based system with the
E1.
Click to expand...
The sensors that are used do not support live preview.
So - it would not be a good idea to try to build a camera that does.

Roland
 
Mirror Lock Up is an OLD SLR feature, dating back at least 50 years. It's used when setting the camera on Bulb, for long exposures, to avoid any camera shake from mirror slap. Mainly used in astronomy.

My E-1 has it as an anti shake measure for just such use. It is NOT used during normal hand held shooting...

TTG
 
Mike Lewis said:
a friken Dslr with a live preview...

if they are that attatched to a P&S stick with a P&S instead of
trying to change how a DSLR should work.
Click to expand...
He just said he wants it during mirror lockup. That is "how a DSLR should work". Right now, all you get during mirror lockup is blackness.

Have you ever done any macro work or long telephoto work using a DSLR (or film SLR)? If so, you'd kill for some form of display, even an EVF, instead of a blacked out focusing screen.

--

Salvage troll posts! When you see a thread started by a troll, post something useful to it. It will drive the trolls up the wall. ;)

Ciao!

Joe

http://www.swissarmyfork.com
 
Franka T.L. said:
Large sensor require power and this will be the key issue.
Click to expand...
Actually, it's not. 1.5x crop CCDs like the ones in the Nikon D70, Minolta 7D, Pentax *ist draw about 1/10 watt (if you want to get picky, 105mW according to the Sony ICX415AQ data sheets). That's the same 1/10 watt of sensors 1/3 their size used in P&S cameras.

Large CMOS sensors like the Nikon D2X or all the Canons draw 1/10 as much power as the CCD, somewhere around 10mW (1/100 of a watt).

The big power draw (and heat source) is the backlight for the LCD display, typically in the 1W area. But even that means hours of display operation with the large batteries of a DSLR.
Franka T.L. said:
But as a
side show, if the Live preview are used with caution and the OVF is
the primary framing. I do not see a reason why it would not work.
Click to expand...
Exactly.

--

Salvage troll posts! When you see a thread started by a troll, post something useful to it. It will drive the trolls up the wall. ;)

Ciao!

Joe

http://www.swissarmyfork.com
 
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