Canon EOS-5DBy: Dave EtchellsSlightly smaller and lighter upgrade brings greater speed and ease of use along with higher res and lower image noise. <<Design :(Previous) | (Next): Optics>> Page 4:ViewfinderReview First Posted: 04/02/2006 |
Viewfinder
The 5D's optical viewfinder is excellent, providing a wealth of information and great accuracy. Because the 5D features nine AF points, the viewfinder shows nine focus point boxes arrayed in a diamond pattern. (Six additional AF points can be activated through the Custom menu, and appear in the spot metering area.) Lining the bottom of the display is a strip of information reporting everything from aperture and shutter speed to flash status and the maximum number of burst shots available. While I don't have a formal test for it, the "eyepoint" of the viewfinder seemed fairly high, making it usable with eyeglasses, although I had to press the lenses of my glasses up against the eyecup to see the full viewfinder area. (The full-frame viewfinder does seem to have a lower eyepoint than the viewfinders on Canon's sub-frame cameras like the EOS-20D and the Digital Rebel series.) (Illustration courtesy Canon USA, Inc.)
It's important to note in discussing the 5D's viewfinder system that the rear-panel LCD display is not usable as a viewfinder. Instead, the optical viewfinder uses a mirror to intercept the image on the way to the shutter and the sensor. Thus, when the camera isn't actively taking a picture, the light from the lens is directed only to the optical viewfinder, and so isn't available to the sensor to drive a live viewfinder display on the LCD. With the exception of the Olympus E-10 and E-20 (which used a beam-splitter prism instead of a mirror, at some cost in light sensitivity) or the new Olympus E-330 (which uses a partially silvered mirror in its Porro optics and a separate dedicated CCD for its electronic viewfinder), all digital SLRs operate in this fashion.
While not strictly a viewfinder function, the capture-mode Info display shown on the rear-panel LCD screen also deserves mention here. The optical viewfinder carries quite a bit of information about camera status as shown above, but there's even more available on the rear panel, just by pressing the Info button. Rather than the exposure settings shown in the optical viewfinder, this display shows date/time, autoexposure bracketing amount, white balance bracketing amount, processing parameter setting, image review status, image review time, color temperature setting (if selected), ISO speed, auto rotate status, auto power off time, flash exposure compensation amount, and megabytes of remaining memory card capacity. Between this screen, the optical viewfinder display, and the LCD data readout on the camera's top, the 5D provides a lot of information.
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