PhotographerMy MP finally landed back on British soil last night according to the lovely people at Leica when I spoke to them a few minutes ago. It sounds like I’m going to be receiving a hefty bill for a large-scale overhaul of its RF assembly (dropping it isn’t the best move for keeping it in a healthy condition), and as I mourned my rapidly diminishing credit limit for this month, I got thinking about viewfinders in general.
I’m not really a great one for rangefinder systems apart from in the dark; parallax error really winds me up, and I tend to like working close up, which only serves to worsen things further. The MP’s viewfinder is very bright and snappy in the dark though, and in situations where I’d be struggling with my Fuji, Nikons and OM-1, I can shoot with rather more confidence. Beyond that however, I find rangefinders to be a slightly lacklustre system.
That’s not to say the other major viewfinder system (SLRs) are any better, as I already mentioned, they lose definition in the dark, black out with small apertures and limit my ability to see anything entering the scene (regardless of whether this is detrimental or may lead to a serendipitous addition, it’s bloody annoying for street photography). They do let me preview DoF however, something which could never be added to an RF.
Or could it?
There’s recently been a impressive rate of improvement in the quality of EVFs being deployed in small cameras. Looking through the Panasonic G1 and Olympus EP-2, the usability of these little screens is astonishingly good; they display information in a nearly infinite number of permutations, can give live previews of the effects of shutter speed and aperture, can magnify the scene to ease manual focussing, and can show you focus points beyond the handful prescribed to SLR users. They don’t do well in the dark though, and regardless of how good they may be getting, they still feel like staring a tiny screen (which is something of an unavoidable obstacle given that’s precisely what you’re doing) and distinctly digital when compared to a prism-based SLR.
All three of the systems have inherent flaws then, and when viewed in context of this newly emerged set of compact cameras with large sensors and interchangeable lenses, none seem to be perfect. We don’t need something perfect though, we need something which is sufficient. None of the systems seem to have reached sufficiency yet, and it will probably be a while until they do.
In all honesty, in spite of all my whinging I’d be sufficiently pleased with a removable optical viewfinder, with an electronic coupling to a single, central focus point (purely so focus confirmation is possible) and a judas window (a la the Trip 35) to reveal aperture. Beyond that, I wouldn’t need much else on my large sensor compact (apart from a 35mm f/2 equivalent lens ;), as sufficiency would have been achieved, and I could get on with the business of taking photos without being impeded in any way.
