Canon EOS 350D Digital RebelCanon makes an impressive update to their wildly popular "Digital Rebel."!<<CMOS Versus CCD & What's It All Mean? :(Previous) | (Next): Optics>> Page 6:ViewfinderReview First Posted: 3/23/2003, updated: 6/4/2005 |
Viewfinder
Virtually identical in design to the 300D's viewfinder, the 350D's optical viewfinder is excellent, providing a wealth of information and good accuracy. The 350D's viewfinder has what Canon calls a "pentamirror" design. (Mirror-based viewfinders trade off viewfinder brightness in favor of considerably reduced expense and weight.) Because the 350D features seven AF points, the viewfinder shows seven focus point boxes arrayed in a cross pattern. When one of the points is selected by the AF system, a bright red dot indicates it in the display. 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 a little low, forcing me to press the lenses of my glasses up against the eyecup to see the full viewfinder area. (This was also the case with the original Rebel, but it was more of an issue for me with the XT.) The good news though, is that the dioptric correction is excellent, covering a broad range from -3 to +1 diopters. The viewfinder display conveys a lot of information about exposure and camera status, as shown in the illustration below. (Courtesy Canon USA, Inc.)
For those readers new to digital SLRs, it's important to note in discussing the 350D'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 FujiFilm S3, which has a live monochrome preview mode, 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 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, color space, processing parameter setting, image review status, image review time, flash exposure compensation, ISO speed, auto rotate status, auto power off time, and megabytes of remaining memory card capacity. Between this screen, the optical viewfinder display, and the smaller LCD data readout on the rear panel, the 350D does an excellent job of keeping you informed of its status and settings.
Here's what all the numbers and indicators in the information display mean:
In Playback mode, there are a number of options for viewing your captured images via the rear-panel LCD screen. You enter Playback mode by pressing the Play button on the back panel. The default display shows the file number, aperture and shutter speed, the current image's sequence number on the card, and total number of images on the memory card. Pressing the Info button activates an information display, which reports the exposure settings for the image and graphs the exposure values on a small histogram, pressing it again shows just the image itself full-screen, with no information overlay, and pressing it a third time returns you to the initial display. You can also view images in an index display, showing 9 small thumbnail images at a time, and enlarge images up to 10x. The two buttons in the upper right hand corner of the rear panel control zooming in and out of the image, and once zoomed, the arrow keys let you scroll the enlarged viewing window around inside the image as a whole. Zooming out past the initial thumbnail display introduces a "jump bar" at the bottom of the screen, allowing you to jump through the images on the card 10 or 100 at a time, or jump by shot date. (This last being very handy on multi-day excursions.)
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