[mikestew]

I think the idea is that the display kinda represents the shot, but not well, but if you cared you wouldn’t be shooting with a $29 camera. I mean, it takes 1920x1080 pics, don’t get too picky there, Ansley Adams. :-)

But I agree with you, I don’t see how the “viewfinder” is all that useful, other than “nifty!”.

[circuit10]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[Groxx]

tbh I would probably enjoy a dirt-cheap viewfinder-and-display-less camera, like an even-cheaper charmera. it'd also make a great party-favor thing: hand them out before an event, and optionally gather photos from people at the end.

[benj111]

Is Ansley Adams this generations David Bailey?

[anukin]

I think OP meant ansel adams. The guy died even before most of the crowd in HN was born.

[mikestew]

I blame autocorrect, though it could have just been my fat fingers. Sibling has it right: “Ansel Adams”.

(“Ansely Adam’s”, WTF, autocorrect?)

[sandspar]

Let me guess, you have an iPhone?

[mikestew]

Check out Nostradamus over here. ;-) You have guessed correctly, as I add to the cries of “this used to work, Apple!”