11 ms·

But if it’s giving you no information about what will actually be in frame you might as well just look in front of you and guess

ShinyLeftPad 2mo ago
Most people (even pros) even with expensive cameras and great viewfinders still take mostly garbage shots and only some are good by luck. Same will be true here Often switching from using your eye to looking through the viewfinder and fiddle with composition is how you ruin a genuine shot and miss the moment. Also I used a camera without a viewfinder for some years, I guarantee if it's a fixed lens you learn what you get quickly.
daniel_reetz 2mo ago
Or develop thesense & skill of using it. It clearly has a fixed FOV that's being cropped based on what's on the display. Humans can learn this stuff, cameras with crude viewfinders have appeared in the past.
- circuit10 2mo ago
  Could you not develop the same sense by just looking in front of you without the viewfinder? I don’t see how a frame that doesn’t actually have any relation to what the camera is capturing helps you at all
  - hug 2mo ago
    The frame is a compositional aid, and it does have quite a strict relation to what the camera is capturing. The best version of your complaint is that the viewfinder does not have accurate frame lines that account for parallax at various distances, which is true, but there are still ways of using the viewfinder to assist in composition. If you take two or three shots at two meters, and look at what the camera captured versus where your composition was in the frame, you can immediately intuit a baseline for where the frame lines 'should be' on the viewfinder at two meters. "Occupies the bottom right two thirds of the viewfinder" for example. Without a reference frame, these intuitions (and your aiming of the camera!) are going to be far less accurate.
  - jjk166 2mo ago
    Seems a lot easier to learn "it's accurate when it's about 8 inches from my face; it's this much off when it is 12 inches away" than to project out a virtual FOV from the camera at an arbitrary position onto the world.

ShinyLeftPad 2mo ago

Most people (even pros) even with expensive cameras and great viewfinders still take mostly garbage shots and only some are good by luck. Same will be true here Often switching from using your eye to looking through the viewfinder and fiddle with composition is how you ruin a genuine shot and miss the moment. Also I used a camera without a viewfinder for some years, I guarantee if it's a fixed lens you learn what you get quickly.

daniel_reetz 2mo ago

Or develop thesense & skill of using it. It clearly has a fixed FOV that's being cropped based on what's on the display. Humans can learn this stuff, cameras with crude viewfinders have appeared in the past.

circuit10 2mo ago
Could you not develop the same sense by just looking in front of you without the viewfinder? I don’t see how a frame that doesn’t actually have any relation to what the camera is capturing helps you at all
- hug 2mo ago
  The frame is a compositional aid, and it does have quite a strict relation to what the camera is capturing. The best version of your complaint is that the viewfinder does not have accurate frame lines that account for parallax at various distances, which is true, but there are still ways of using the viewfinder to assist in composition. If you take two or three shots at two meters, and look at what the camera captured versus where your composition was in the frame, you can immediately intuit a baseline for where the frame lines 'should be' on the viewfinder at two meters. "Occupies the bottom right two thirds of the viewfinder" for example. Without a reference frame, these intuitions (and your aiming of the camera!) are going to be far less accurate.
- jjk166 2mo ago
  Seems a lot easier to learn "it's accurate when it's about 8 inches from my face; it's this much off when it is 12 inches away" than to project out a virtual FOV from the camera at an arbitrary position onto the world.