![]() ![]() It stands to reason you don’t want to see half of it, or a tenth of it, so why wouldn’t you just want to see all of it? As with many things, however, it turns out that the uncomplicated answer is not the correct one. Now, if you were no expert and just taking a stab at this, you’d probably guess that you would want to see in the viewfinder all of the picture you’re about to take. You can see from this that when one camera manufacturer reports that its viewfinder has 92% coverage and another reports 95% coverage, you still can’t quite be sure how they compare, because one might be reporting linear coverage and the other area coverage. The linear coverage of the inside square is 80% of the larger one (8 instead of 10) the area coverage is 64% (8 x 8 instead of 10 x 10). That square has eight little squares on each side. Now imagine that we’re going to draw a slightly smaller square inside the big one that’s smaller by one little square on each side. The linear measure is 10 x 10 little squares, and the area measure is 100 little squares. To simplify this, imagine a big square drawn on graph paper that has ten little squares per side. To further confound matters, coverage is sometimes reported as a linear measure and sometimes as an area measure. If you can see through the viewfinder half of what will be on the negative, that would be 50% coverage. The ZX-5n’s viewfinder image fit inside the ME Super’s with lots of room to spare.Ĭoverage: this compares what you can see in the viewfinder with what will be recorded on the film. I once tried an interesting little experiment - with identical 50mm lenses on both, I held a Pentax ME Super (high magnification) to one eye and a Pentax ZX-5n (low magnification) to the other. I hope it stands to reason that magnification also determines the apparent relative size of the viewfinder image rectangle. Better cameras have higher magnification.88X is better than. What this means is that your camera, with a 50mm lens on it, set at infinity, makes things appear to be three-quarters the size they look to be with your naked eye.5X means half as big. Less often stated is that the lens must be set at infinity, because magnification also changes slightly depending on how close or far you focus the lens. So camera magnification is specified with a 50mm lens. Now, obviously, magnification also changes when you use different lens focal lengths - telephotos make things look bigger, wide-angles make things look smaller. 1X is the size that things appear to be when you look at them with your eye (a.k.a. Like a batting average, it’s usually expressed as some decimal fraction of one. Magnification: this refers to how big the viewfinder image appears to be in an absolute sense. Viewfinder image: this is your view of the world through the camera, the little rectangle with black edges that shows you what part of the world the lens is looking at and whether it’s in focus or not.Ī typical viewfinder. Oh, did I say “dangerous”? I meant “demanding.” Or maybe “discriminating.” Undesirable, in any event.) Why do you think the manufacturers are able to get away with such blatant skimping? An educated consumer is a dangerous consumer. To be clear, let’s define a few terms about viewfinders, just in case you’re not entirely up to speed. The worst offenders are cameras that are meant to be cheap (they have mirror-box prisms) or cameras that are meant to be small (which usually have poorer coverage). ![]() With the exception of the Contax Aria of the late ’90s and the more recent Minolta Maxxum 7, virtually allentry-level to mid-range cameras skimp on the viewfinder. Yet the viewfinder is perhaps the single most fudged and botched aspect of today’s 35mm SLRs. Throughout the history of cameras, the method of aiming the camera accurately and communicating its view to the operator is what has determined and defined most different basic camera types. The viewfinder is the single most important user interface on any camera. ![]()
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