In article
[snip...]
>> (I have often wondered if camera manufacturers made their AF body VF's
>> so bad in order to make people think they need AF [so the manufacturers
>> can sell all those new AF lenses...]
>I don't think most of the AF's viewfinder are dimmer then their manual
>counterpart. If you compared a viewfinder of that from an A2e,N90,
>F4,f5,Eos-1, you'll find them to be much brighter. The focusing screens
>have improved quite a bit.
In your edited and unattributed quote of what I said, I was refering to
the sharpness and contrast of the viewfinder image... Most recent AF finders
are brighter than older finders (to make people less dissatisfied with those
absurdly slow f4-5.6 AF zooms...;-), but the consequence is that the image
is less useful for manual focus - and the finders tend to have sharpness and
distortion problems near the frame edges (and often sharpness problems near
the center, too...). A dark-but-contrasty finder, like those found in 70's Nikkormat's, Minolta SRT's, Pentax's, Canon's, etc. are actually preferable
for easy manual focusing to the bright-but-soft finders found in many current AF cameras (the Rebel compounds this problem by combining the negative aspects of both types of finders...). The F3 finder strikes a good balance between brightness and contrast - and has the added advantages of accurate
coverage, low distortion, and reasonable uniformity of image quality across
the frame.
Hope This Helps
(David Ruether - http://www.fcinet.com/ruether )