I completely disagree
It seems dumb to me that back cant use information flowing into them in a useful way
(I am not talking from an engineering point of view but as a buyer)
$400 P+S cameras have live view even with face recognistion that draws a square around what is sharp !
Pro Video cameras have hatching the shows in their screens for focus assist
The new canon does it
It would seem that £30000 of back should have live view and the best instant
zooming hatching highlight flashing wonder LCDs available on the planet
(whatever is required to check focus easily) -
At that point ALPA would become useable to those who need quick and close focus and surely a new generation of mirrorles bodies would come about with the many advantages (weight size speed vibration non retrofocal etc) that that could bring
ALPA believe that the back makers are not thinking straight - I agree
SMM
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Ah, I see what you mean about on-screen focus indicators, but let me play devil's advocate.
I still doubt that a tiny low resolution screen can indicate accurately enough where the points of best focus lie on a 39 MP image, for example. In a P&S camera, the user just wants to know whether the face or the background wall is in focus. That is easy to indicate even on a tiny screen. This feature is useful to EVERY P&S user.
With a MFDB or view camera, we need to know whether it is the eyelashes or the eyeball in focus. A whole eye is represented by so few pixels on the LCD screen that I don't think the user could reliably pick the difference. Tethered shooting solves this problem very effectively, so an LCD-based solution is only useful to the untethered crowd.
How many view camera users are working in the field (where tethering is difficult but not impossible) and not shooting landscapes (in which case achieving correct focus is not usually an issue)? There may be some but not many. That make the expensive add-on even harder to justify.
I expect that the R&D costs of adding such technology would add thousands to the price of each back. You can't really compare it with a player like Canon which might spend $1 million developing a custom chipset to provide this feature, and then amortize it across 500,000 bodies a year at $2 per body (those figures are estimates). MFDB makers are selling more like 1-5,000 bodies per year each.
The MFDBs have a lot more data to process too, up to 10x a typical P&S, which means a lot more heat. The MFDB makers seem to want to keep the volume of circuitry to a minimum to prevent increased temperature and therefore noise. I doubt the point and shoot manufacturers are concerned about this.