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Canon EOS D60

Canon updates their D30 Semi Pro SLR with a 6 megapixel sensor and other improvements, and sets a new low-price point in the process!

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Page 4:Viewfinder

Review First Posted: 2/22/2002


Viewfinder

A near-duplicate of the D30's viewfinder, the D60's viewfinder is excellent on all fronts, providing great information, easy use, and high accuracy. Relative to the viewfinder display in the D30, the D60 adds information on maximum shots available in the buffer, remaining frames, and a flash exposure compensation icon to alert you whenever you've got exposure compensation dialed in for the flash. While we don't have a formal test for it, the "eyepoint" of the viewfinder seemed quite high, making it comfortable to use with eyeglasses. The dioptric correction is also excellent, covering a broad range from -3 to +1 diopters. I measured its accuracy at 94 percent, closely agreeing with Canon's official specification of 95 percent frame coverage. (I have to say though, that I'd really like to see it be a full 100% coverage - Viewfinder inaccuracy is a pet peeve of mine.) The viewfinder display conveys a lot of information about exposure and camera status, as shown in the illustration below. (Courtesy Canon USA, Inc.)

Important to note in discussing the D60's viewfinder system is 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 use a beam-splitter prism instead of a mirror, at some cost in light sensitivity), 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 probably deserves mention at this point. 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 shooting mode, auto-bracketing and flash exposure compensation, shots and memory card space remaining, ISO setting, and the status of all custom-function options selected (albeit in a very terse numerical format). New to this display since the D30 is the "Parameters" indicator in the middle: The D60 now supports multiple parameter settings, that can be loaded from a host computer for rapid selection. Between this screen, the optical viewfinder display, and the LCD data readout on the camera's top, the D60 is one of the most "informative" cameras I've yet worked with.

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