On Sep 19, 2006, at 10:59 AM, Cotty wrote: > Of possible interest to note in this thread: TV cameras still use CRTs > for viewfinders. The LCDs still don't come anywhere close in > quality. As > such, I use an electronic viewfinder (EVF) every day for between > one and > four hours. It's not up to an optical viewfinder, but it's light years > ahead of still camera EVFs. A friend has an Oly with an EVF and I > looked > down the eyepiece and recoiled in horror. He seemed to think it > okay but > no way could in take that.
The interesting thing is that those tiny CRTs are likely lower resolution than the LCD displays, but the high refresh speed and crispness make them much nicer on the eye. Of the EVF cameras I've owne, the Oly C8080WZ had a really poor EVF, the Panasonic FZ10 was very low resolution and slow refresh ... birds on the wing literally disappeared in the display due to the slow refresh and poor resolution although the manual focus resolution was not bad with the use of the magnifier ... the Sony F707/717/828 were all ok but didn't provide very good manual focusing magnification. The R1's is a cut above the other Sonys in that they provide adequate magnification on manual focus and the option of 60hz refresh rate (still slows down in low light since it's pulling the data off the main sensor as fast as it can). The A2 has so far been the best with both more pixels (at 922,000 pixels, it's close to 4x the density of the R1), 60hz refresh option, and a pretty good magnification option. It also has more user configuration options that allow it to work well in poor light circumstances. No EVF can be as responsive as an optical viewfinder, it will always take more time to process a raster display than to just transmit and bend light, but given enough development to produce more resolution and higher refresh rates, they might come to meet the practical needs of the optical reflex system in terms of resolution and responsiveness while providing some interesting possible advantages beyond what can be done with optics alone. Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
