wrote:
The SLR was a great idea when needed to have a seperate path for
viewing and film exposure, but with digital, the sensor can be the
viewing as well as the recording medium so perhaps less need for a
separate path via flip up mirror ?

It depends.

First, to drive two digital outputs (display + data recording) requires the
product to have more power ... both computational power and literal power
(battery).

Second, an LCD display isn’t always a good thing to view through, as there’s
lag for example, which degrades tracking performance of moving targets.
The classical optical path operates at 186,000 miles/second, which is a few
femtoseconds, whereas the digital display replacement requires photon to
electron reception on the CCD, followed by a data read, then data transmit,
data processing, another transmit, & finally to be redisplayed. Even with current
technology still takes bunches of milliseconds...and try to see where this metric
even listed in product reviews: it’s already been found that in 3D VR simulators this
delay often causes nausea in human subject research volunteers (and thus, limits/
affects experimental designs).

Similarly, in pragmatic field use, one classical photography principle is to put the sun at
your back ... but this means that the sun is now positioned so that it will illuminate your
LCD display & degrade its readability unless it’s shaded - such as being designed with
the same eyepiece cup as classical SLR’s. FYI, shooting during Golden Hours results
in a much lower sun angle which can accentuate this as a problem...the outcome is that
the photographer needs to have a big fat head to make shade to see what he’s framing.


-hh