X100v OVF

Truman Prevatt wrote:

Jay A wrote:

When I first purchased an X100 camera years ago, I felt that the fact that it had an OVF along with an EVF was wonderful. Until recently, I never cared for EVFs as I felt they were very difficult to view through and see all the details in the scene. Nowadays though, they have become pretty good and it has led me to question the usefulness of the OVF in the latest X100 cameras.

A couple of things about the OVF really bother me.

First, while I understand that some like the idea of seeing outside the actual frame, I do think that the frame at least on the OVF in the X100v is too small. The image should be magnified a bit with less outside frame real estate.

Second, a very irritating fact about focusing with the OVF is the fact that if you use the corrected frame option (and you should so that you are positioning the camera correctly in order to compensate for parallax error), you cannot even see a correctly placed corrected frame until you first press down the shutter release to focus. The frame will THEN be positioned correctly. So, unless you already knew where the camera would correctly focus, you must focus a second time where that corrected frame now falls.

Parallax error is a function of distance. Hence it cannot be calculated until the camera knows the distance which is why you have to focus first. However, for a fixed focal length lens - it is pretty simple to estimate it just by eyeball.

Third, the focus frames in the OVF are just too big. When using the OVF, the camera does not always focus correctly. When using the EVF, the focus point frame size can be changed and become more able to pinpoint correctly.

I do understand that one of the biggest draws to these cameras is the ability to switch between EVF and OVF. But I think that at this point with improved EVFs, the OVF has outlived its value. It seems to be more of a gimmick than anything. An effort to make these cameras seem like Leicas.

Comments?

I suppose you may be able to estimate where the corrected focus frame will appear, but with the EVF you don't have to. The current EVF is pretty good. You can see highlights much better than you could with the EVF in the original  X100. I am just saying that I am not sure the current OVF makes much sense anymore unless you want to see outside the frame lines.