Godfrey, You bring up a great point. Brightness is only one aspect of the finder. I base most of my preference on the ability to manually focus. My niece was visiting a while back. She had a Nikon D70 with her and I tried to focus it manually - yuch! It was bright, but very difficult to tell when things were sharply in focus. She agreed. She had been using a D1x and manually focusing quite often. With the D70, she pretty much had to rely on autofocus. This is not just a problem with the D70 - it seems to be quite common on most lower priced cameras. Make the viewfinder more cheaply and rely on AF to achieve focus.
A sometimes contributor to the list was getting ready to buy her first DSLR and I recommended that she go around and try all the brands with the same speed lens on and try to manually focus. I think she was rather surprised at the differences she found. She ended up with a DS partly because of the ability to manually focus easily. -- Best regards, Bruce Wednesday, March 22, 2006, 7:25:49 AM, you wrote: GD> Sylwek, GD> The DL finder is slightly brighter than the DS finder at the expense GD> of some magnification. The new screen is designed to enhanced GD> brightness but I find it doesn't have quite the same "focusing tooth" GD> to my eye. That is, I find the DS finder allows me to focus a 20-35/4 GD> and 50/1.4 a little more consistently and accurately than the DL GD> finder. The difference is small but noticeable to me. GD> I've looked through both cameras side by side with the same lens on GD> them. I still prefer the DS viewfinder. GD> This is a minor issue. Overall, the two cameras are much of the same GD> otherwise. GD> Godfrey GD> On Mar 22, 2006, at 12:25 AM, Sylwester Pietrzyk wrote: >> ... it is viewfinder in Dl that is noticeably brighter than the one in >> Ds - mainly thanks to new matte screen called Natural Bright Matte >> II. I >> think Dario can confirm my observation especially that he had these >> two >> cameras at the same time. Contrary to Ds Dl has multicoated viewfinder >> eyepiece too. Magnification of viewfinder in Dl is obviously >> smaller than in >> Ds, it is in the middle between Ds and Nikon D70. All in all quite >> useable >> for manual focusing.
