Retro


Feb. 6, 2025

OM-3 et al; Retro to a fault

Continuing to place the viewfinder in the center of mirrorless cameras & continuing to include the weird pentaprism lump feels a bit daft, to me at least. Sure it looks the part (no accounting for taste) but it’s an awkward and a redundant hangover from the days when these things were physically required to be centeral on the camera body for the camera to work.

There’s no good reason for modern mirrorless cameras to continue to force the user to squish their noses against the back-screen in the age of digital. Rangefinder manufacturers figured this out decades ago; there wasn’t a physical requirement to have a pentaprism and central VF - so they didn’t, and now mirrorless cameras don’t need to either, so why continue to ape an SLR era compromise? Taste.

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