GX7 - EVF quality

Dave Lively wrote:

Tom Caldwell wrote:

Joe I think it is a sort of "expectation" situation.

I found the Sony NEX6 and A7R evf units very good, but this hardly made up for other things that I was not so impressed by. My argument is don't ask for wonders and you will find the GX7 evf will be a pleasant surprise.

I had the add on viewfinder for the NEX-5N I owned before switching to m43 and liked it better. It was bigger and sharper.

While I do not see the color tearing unless I am really looking for it the GX7 viewfinder always seems just a little soft to me. With the NEX I could manually focus by looking through the EVF and when the lens was in focus the image would kind of pop into focus. That never happens with the GX7 so I have to rely on focus peaking.

The computer generated lines and text in the EVF seem sharper than the image itself so it could be the problem is in how the camera process images sent to the EVF and not the EVF itself. I have mild astigmatism and do not wear glasses while using the EVF so it could also be my eyesight is causing the problem. Astigmatism does bad things with some types of optics but not others. I always try to focus the EVF on an actual image instead of computer generated text but that does not help.

The EVF is certainly good enough for framing images though. The only time I have issues with it is when I am manually focusing a legacy lens. The pinpoint and other auto focus options work so well on the GX7 I rarely use manual focus on legacy lenses.

Unfortunately no other company has made a clone of the Ricoh Mode2 focus peaking and therefore we have to make do with regular eyesight and "hunt the flicker" which slows down the exercise considerably.