I guess, I come across as an awful snob. There are two things to think of here.
First, if the camera suits your needs, it suits your needs. There is nothing more that needs be said.
Second, I think, a lot of us old timers spent a lot of time perfecting skills. Then along came automation that does it nearly as well. We kind of resent it when folks make claims that they can do it better than we can without any practice at all. Especially, when it is only the camera, and not them that is doing it. However, I think that no matter how much you practice using your autofocus it still works about as well as the first time you used it. Not only that but the old skills will eventually be lost for good. That feels bad.
The military claims that almost no one who joins up knows how to shoot any more. When you stop and think about the fact that for the first 400 years on this continent knowing how to shoot well put food on your table, and may have saved you life, that is sad. Heck most folks today are not too aware that something had to be killed to put meat on their table.
Who knows how to use an axe? I have been an outdoorsman most of my life, and when I see an expert with an ax at work, I always realize that I never really did. As I said it is sad to realize that skills are being lost.
Luckily, there are a few dedicated individuals in most areas of expertise who find it an interesting challenge to perfect old skills. It would be nice if they never needed to reinvent those skills from scratch, but that happens all too often.
For a 100 years or so they worked hard on improving the human interface of cameras. Then along came automation, and they obviously don't feel any need to even try anymore. However, Pentax seems to be the one company that still cares. Anyone who has compared the viewfinder of the *istD which any of the other DSLR's in the price range can confirm that.
It all kind of reminds me of a SF story I once read where the lead character was laughed at because he claimed to have discovered a way to do division without a calculator. Do they still teach long division? I don't know.
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Kostas Kavoussanakis wrote:
On Sun, 1 Aug 2004, Ryan Lee wrote:
Anyway, I just had the horrible thought that maybe some newbie slightly interested in photography might pick up a relatively cheap body like a 50, and because of the less than satisfactory viewfinder, not get as into photography as he/she could have been otherwise.
It did not happen to me, that's for sure. Given the AF capability I did not find it that bad; the -5n is slightly better, I agree. I had an ME Super for a while and I am not sure it was much better (for different reasons), particularly not with long slow lenses like my beloved M75-150/4. I guess (Graywolf) I would think the same about the MX (which I would not consider even if it was free, as it lacks basic for my shooting functionality).
Horses for courses.
Kostas
-- graywolf http://graywolfphoto.com/graywolf.html
