Reading some recent discussions, on square medium format and rangefinders, I was struck by the irony that many serious photographers like the medium format waist level finder and true rangefinder 35mm cameras, and yet the same people generally dislike the LCD viewfinders, EVF;s and non-SLR compact digital cameras; yet there are many similarites, and the differences should be fixable eventually.
The waist level and LCD viefinder screens suffer from an apparent image size far smaller than the one through an eye-peice ("peep-hole") viewfinder, but onthe other hand are nice for visualization, as using them is more like viewing a print; the non-SLR approach reduces bulk, noise, shutter lag and vibration, and supposedly allows better wide angle lens designs.
Perhaps high end LCD viewfinders could eventually be upgraded in the following way, as an alternative to a DSLR and its optical viewfinder.
a) A detachable LCD shade hood with magnifier: I imagine this as a pyramid with its base covering completely the LCD and with a magnifying eye-piece at the apex, so when used it would turn the system into a bulky but high quality EVF. The LCD swivels, and so does this.
b) Bigger LCD's: like the 2.5" one on the Leica/Panasonic digital camera or beyond.
c) More pixels: about 600x600 = 360,000 would be enough to match what the eye can resolve in the square MF waist level viewfinder, not so far beyond the best that I have heard of so far ("220,000 equivalent" in the EVF of the Minolta 7Hi); but even more, and viewfinder zooming, would be nice.
d) a regular "four walls" shade hood option too, to allow waist-level style viewing even in bright light.
The "beyond the frame view" (sport finder?) feature would still be missing; I suppose a little optical peep-hole could be included too. Or you could just use a wider lens and live with a bit of cropping (like the cropping that rangefinder and most MF users need to do anyway whenever the desired field of view does not match their available fixed focal lengths so that a somewhat wider one must be used.)