[Eruditass]

Well I compared D40 viewfinder and found it to be much more "cleaner".

Like the D50, the D40's viewfinder is a pentamirror design, rather than the more costly, but brighter pentaprism.

k20d is a pentaprism, d40 is a pentamirror. k200d and k2000 are pentamirrors and will probably look similar to the d40's.

[silverflower]

not really. D40 was with sigma 50-150 2.8 but even with kit lens D40's viewfinder looks brighter. Mine has some texture which resembles fingerprint.

- Texture from focus screen is more visible with a higher f number (see optical DoF preview), with a 2.8 lens is almost invisible, that could explain the difference.
- Mine has too a fingerprint pattern but is different (sleek) inside round brackets (K20).

[Marc Sabatella]

not really. D40 was with sigma 50-150 2.8 but even with kit lens D40's viewfinder looks brighter. Mine has some texture which resembles fingerprint.

You might check out a recent post to the Pentax SLR forum on dpreview, containing an excerpt from an interview with one of the engineers at Pentax. As he explains it, there is more or less an inverse relationship between brightness of the focusing screen and actual accuracy in manual focus, particularly with respect to gauging DOF accurately. But I guess there's a tradeoff - obviously, it needs to be bright enough to see well. I guess the microlens lens design can either be tweaked to slightly improve brightness or accuracy of MF, but you can't have it both ways. The D40 apparently chooses brightness at the expense of accuracy of MF; Pentax apparently prefers it the other way around. As someone who uses MF lenses a lot, I definitely appreciate this.

[mtroute]

You might check out a recent post to the Pentax SLR forum on dpreview, containing an excerpt from an interview with one of the engineers at Pentax. As he explains it, there is more or less an inverse relationship between brightness of the focusing screen and actual accuracy in manual focus, particularly with respect to gauging DOF accurately. But I guess there's a tradeoff - obviously, it needs to be bright enough to see well. I guess the microlens lens design can either be tweaked to slightly improve brightness or accuracy of MF, but you can't have it both ways. The D40 apparently chooses brightness at the expense of accuracy of MF; Pentax apparently prefers it the other way around. As someone who uses MF lenses a lot, I definitely appreciate this.

And Canon could care less because you have to buy all new lenses everytime you upgrade your camera.