ELECTRONIC VIEWFINDERS
Having got rid of mirror and pentaprism, mirrorless cameras have to rely on their image sensor to show you the scene in front of your lens.
A few years back, a comparison between optical and electronic viewfinders (EVFs) would have been a purely academic exercise, because EVFs simply couldn’t compete. There was the unacceptable time lag at start-up, colour casts, poor resolution, low refresh rate, and fairly abysmal performance in low light. The list of flaws was as long as a 300mm lens.
Fast forward to 2020, and the only real remaining drawback is their appetite for battery power, easily overcome by getting into the habit of packing a spare battery for a day’s shooting. If you have bad memories of using EVFs some years back, I encourage you to visit your nearest camera store and check out one of the newer models.
Camera manufacturers have been busy addressing all the previously mentioned shortcomings of EVFs. For example, the EVF in Canon’s EOS R has a resolution of 3.7 million dots and a refresh rate of 60fps, which pretty much gives you a real-world feel.
Now to the advantages of EVFs. Being entirely digital, they can show you a wealth of information and data, which you simply can’t get from an OVF. Any serious photographer will value the histogram, instantly, in real time. The landscape photographer will appreciate the digital level, and you can even display a distance-to-object scale.
SOME OF THE INFORMATION AN EVF CAN SHOW
However, the ace up the sleeve of any EVF is the ability to show you exactly what the image is going to look like rather than what the world in front of the lens looks like. When changing aperture or exposure, you can see the effect on your image straight away. Not only that, but you can follow the change in the depth of field and pick the optimum aperture. For macro photography, you can enlarge a portion of your image to check focus. And the guesswork is taken out of shooting your composition in black and white because you see exactly what you will get.
It may take some time to get used to the differences when you switch cameras, but at least you won’t need to worry about EVF resolution and refresh rates when you reach for one of the latest models of full-frame mirrorless cameras.