A reminder: You don't hate EVF's and Live View

There are a lot of people who are stuck to the idea that a good camera MUST necessarily have a reflex mirror. What makes EVF's really good wasn't obvious to me until I started shooting my RB67, even though my RB67 has a reflex mirror.

See, for most cameras that most folks are used to these days, you are accustomed to the viewfinder being this tunnel-vision thing you see through, because that's about as good as you can get with a 35mm-or-smaller-sensor. Well, maybe for a P&S you could put a nice expansive viewfinder, but those have their own problems that make them hard to use.

Now, on my RB67, the viewfinder is an expansive thing. It's bigger than most dSLR back LCD displays. There's a hood to help prevent light from falling on it and a diopter to help with focusing. So, because the smallest viewfinder I'm used to is the one on my 35mm film camera, I have an awful time using anybody's digital SLR (Unless they've got one of the full-frame ones) because I can barely compose and really can't focus with any sort of comfort. On my G7, I have used the optical viewfinder a few times, largely because of glare issues. On my A95, I pretty much never used it because I could just fold out the display.

Processing speeds keep going up and LCD displays get brighter. Back in the days when everybody shot film, the LCDs on the digital cameras sucked and you wanted to use the viewfinder. Those days are gone and you may not have realized this yet.

And there's a bunch of advantages to live view that we're only starting to explore because folks are too obsessed with getting more megapixels. I mean, it's pretty clear to me that I can set a focusing point faster by using a finger than a joystick if a touch screen was added. But there's a lot more that could be done. You could drag a box around and get the histogram for just that area. Or a two-finger zoom like the iPhone. Or drag lines to straightness with a motorized tilt/shift lens. Or put your forefinger on one spot and your thumb on the other and have the focal length and aperture set such that both of those spots would be as close to perfectly sharp as possible.

So don't you say that a digital camera sucks because there's no reflex mirror. It may suck because they haven't made electronic viewfinders good enough yet. But we're just scratching the surface of what digital cameras can do.

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Been totally uninspired to take pictures of late. So I collected some rolls of film and sent them off to get developed and I'm going on a nice LONG bike ride tomorrow and we'll see how that goes.

Oh, and there's been some hacking involved, too.