With each new technological advance we see, it seems to me that some tried-and-true tradition, some conventional feature, is quietly assassinated in some back alley by a deadly ninja.

Now while I'm all in favor of ninjas being able to find good, stable work, I am saddened to see certain things go.

What the heck am I talking about? Well these days, it happens to be the OPTICAL VIEWFINDER whose murder is quietly being plotted.

Most notably, optical viewfinders have been completely eliminated from all but a select few "point and shoot" digital compact cameras. If you wanna take a picture, you gotta use that battery-sucking LCD on the back of the camera.

We took quite a step backwards when we went from full-frame 35mm viewfinders to 1.5x and 1.6x etc. DSLR viewfinders. Especially in consumer cameras, viewfinders were like looking through a tunnel. You couldn't manual focus for beans. (Oh and speaking of manual focus, split-prism viewfinders have been six feet under for years now...)

Then we started brainwashing people that "full-frame" was the only hope. When in reality, cameras like the Canon 5D actually have a pretty cheap, small viewfinder, that is actually almost surpassed in size and brightness by a D300 viewfinder. (Which is one reason I love my D300- It is DX, but Nikon has FINALLY taken a no-compromises approach to viewfinders and made it a top priority.)

Then, right when camera makers were just barely starting to increase their viewfinder size, along comes live view. Namely, and the spark that ignited this blog entry, the new Sony DSLR's. Praised for their brilliant execution of live view, which allows full-speed autofocus during live view, Sony has secretly hired another ninja and sicced them on optical viewfinders- They sacrificed a TON of viewfinder size in order to make the whole live view thing work. It's complicated, so don't ask, but suffice it to say that the Sony A350, their new flagship amateur / semi-pro camera, has one of the smallest viewfinders in the history of DSLR's, period.

Sony claims to be aiming squarely at the professional market, saying they will even push out Canon and/or Nikon for the #1 or #2 spot in the industry. Well if you ask me, they just shot themselves in the foot. If they want to be serious about convincing actual professionals to use their gear, they had better stop GOOFING AROUND with turning DSLR's into just another electronic gadget. The day that a feature so conventional as a big, bright viewfinder is compromised, that's the day I'll stop buying new DSLRs, period.

=Matt=