EVF or OVF? Sony is committed to the electronic viewfinder. There are many voices against it, but my experience is very limited... a short holding of an a55 at the Focus on Imaging show!

It would be interesting to hear what others think of OVF on an experience basis. The experience comes in 3 categories, firstly those who use both EVF and OVF cameras extensively, secondly, those who only have experience of EVF (there must be plenty of new Sony/DSLR users falling into this bracket), and, thirdly those who regularly use OVF, but, on occasion, have used or use EVF.

I have to admit to being nervous of EVF, but this is as a result of a lifetime's experience with OVF, and whilst I am not averse to change, does the use of EVF detract from the ability to create images as good as with EVF?

It will make interesting reading, so let's hope we get plenty of experiences.

Michael Thorpe

This has been a pretty heavily discussed topic on these forums.

See for example http://www.photoclubalpha.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=4978.

My take on this is that this generation of EVFs work for people who don't need the screen to be articulate and fast and who don't mind looking into a mini LCD screen.

I'm an OVF user with experience with an Olympus PEN EVF and a little with the a55 EVF.

One other thing is the type of OVF that a user has experience with. A person using one of Sony APS-C with Quick LV would have a different impression of which is better than an A900 or even an A700 user would have.

One of the reasons why I stayed with Minolta during the film days was because of their excellent large bright viewfinders (such as Maxxum 7) compared with the Canon mid range.

KM and Sony carried on that tradition with the KM7D, A700 and A850/900.

As to my experience, it's very limited with EVFs because when I bought EVF cameras (because of the great advance in that generations EVF) I had difficulty manually focusing with them, and I found all the "useful" info in the EVF to be a distraction when I was trying to compose and focus. I had to keep switching EVF modes from info to picture-only which required cycling through a number of other options. I ended up giving them to my sons and going back to OVF cameras where I could easily manually focus (even on my old manual focus cameras I had the split image focusing screen replaced with a plain screen) and have all the camera info visible in the VF but not encroaching on the scene. (the EVF designer habit of cluttering up the photo with all sorts of info instead of just keeping it in the border of the VF is just poor ergonomic design by people enamored with "neat and nifty - look at what we can do."

tom

Although I don't find it difficult to switch display 'styles' I admit one thing on my wishlist is customizable screens. F'rinstance, the level AND the histogram on one screen, discreetly placed of course.