Originally posted by Laurentiu Cristofor So isn't that the point? To see what kind of image you are able to record? Do you think the viewfinder was made for people to admire views through it? It is simply a tool to frame and focus - and with AF, you just use it to frame and check camera settings while you do it. You can do all that on an LCD and then some.
Hm. "…made for people to admire views through it"—that way of putting it a little incendiary, I think. All I'm saying is that I'd rather see the scene through the lens using optics alone. There are lots of reasons I have for this. I'll lay them out for reference:
I find that the "then some" can be a little distracting. In certain situations, I might be tempted to put a histogram on the screen while I shoot; in others, I might want other information on the screen. This is all stuff I would end up fiddling with instead of shooting. I had this experience when I tried to shoot an event with a friend's micro 4/3rds camera.
LCDs just don't seem high enough quality to rival the sharpness of a viewfinder. Some of them are pretty bad in sunlight, at certain angles, and so on. With a good pentaprism VF, I don't have to worry about that.
I wouldn't be using the LCD to check focus…I haven't used autofocus in years, and I just sold my last autofocus zoom to buy a couple old Pentax-A primes. I don't like that enlarge-to-focus stuff: while I found it quite usable, but the process wasn't fast enough for me: I had to pick the point to zoom in on, focus, zoom out to recompose, hope my subject didn't move. I could imagine using live view this way, but I'd have to get quicker with it.
If live view helps you frame better, that's cool—who cares what I think?
I probably just need to get used to it, but I don't really want to. (;