Bit of a con, really ... ?

[The Natural Philosopher]

In this case strangely rarely and uniquely, Dennis is correct. My SLR has no electronics in the viewfinder. Its all done with mirrors.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not really, no.

The LCD on mine is for menu items and occasionally a quick postview of shots already taken.,

[The Natural Philosopher]

Why bother?

That's all doable post the event in photoshop.

What you DO need is a histogram display to show you haven't saturated any of the channels. That you cant 'shop out.

I shoot entirely without more than a quick color temp adjustment, and often not that.

If I want a crisper image for a product shot, I can do all that in software.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Then you need a video camera ;-)

>

[The Natural Philosopher]

You dont have a depth of field preview on the camera?

I wouldn't even say that.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

That's what I mean. No point in having a digital camera if you can't look at a pic instantly. Might as well stick to film.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well I shot 150 pics on Sunday and ddi'nt look at a single one till Sunday night. What's the point? they were action shots. They either worked or they didn't.

About 10% were usable.

[Leonard Caillouet]

My Nikon D60 has a raw+jpeg mode, and I think many others do as well. With the size and speed of memory these days, it is not a big deal to store both. I do this for my son's baseball games and zip up the jpegs and send them to the other parents and if someone wants more versatility to tweak a particular image I send them the raw file.

Leonard

[Leonard Caillouet]

Your Spyder will not give accurate results on narrow spectrum devices like LED backlit displays, or even some LCDs with CCFLs or DLP and LCOS displays. It depends greatly on the relation of the filters in your colorimeter to the filters in the display, and the spectrum of the source. To accurately measure many of the newer displays like the LED lit and the new laser based DLP sets, you really need a spectrophotometer with very fine resolution, preferably in the 1 nM range. Tristimulus colorimeters like the spyder and all of the Sencore probes are rapidly becoming less useful.

Leonard

[William Sommerwerck]

I find it interesting how people -- carelessly, if not deliberately -- misread posts.

I was making the point that Live View is a good way to get accurate color balance at the time the photo is taken, especially under light sources without continuous spectra. The issue is not whether a camera can take raw and compressed images at the same time, but whether one /needs/ a properly balanced JPG image /right away/. This is impossible with a raw file.

[William Sommerwerck]

It's rarely mentioned that DoF preview is little more than a minor convenience. It's likely to show more depth of field that you actually get, because we usually look at the finished print at an effective magnification higher than the viewfinder's, and the focusing screen's grain (however fine) obscures the distinction between what is and what isn't out of focus. *

The safest thing one can say is that if something looks out of focus during DoF preview, it will almost always be out of focus in the print. The opposite is not necessarily true.

Canon's DoF preview, when a suitable electronic flash is attached, fires the flash for about one second. This not only provides illumination to overcome the dim image at small f-stops, but gives a good idea of the evenness (or lack thereof) of the lighting.

• In general, the coarser the grain, the dimmer the image, but the more-obviously objects pop in and out of focus. This is one of the reasons professional cameras offer a variety of focusing screens.

[Stephen Howard]

Indeed I do - but like most DOF previews it requires you to press the button and hold it to maintain the function. You'd then have to select the zoom focus function to magnify the portion of the image you wanted to work on and make suitable adjustments - then move it to the other end of the depth of field and do likewise...then move it back to check the previous setting...and so on - and all on a three inch screen. That's assuming you don't regard such conveniences as being for wimps and prefer to squint through the viewfinder. You'd need a particularly good tripod too with all that button pressing. Using the data cable and a computer makes the operation faster, more precise and realistically more feasible - all of which are benefits a professional would consider essential.

See above.

Regards,

[Meat Plow]

Maybe across the pond they are but I see no evidence of that here :)

I've seen the commercial and questioned myself as to how the hell someone came up with a pure LED screen that could reproduce millions of colors precisely. But then I thought of Sony's Organic Display and thought maybe it was a take on that.

I guess now that I think of it and knowing of the Sony OLED, Sammy calling it an LED TV does seem a bit more deceptive to me at least.

[whisky-dave]

Is that why they take so long choosing anything from curtains to shoe colour ? And then change their mind again, to the one they liked 4 hours ago. :)

[whisky-dave]

Any thoughts on the 24-inch Apple LED Cinema Display it's a bit pricey and it might be good of displaying photos but I'm not sure about movies as it has a 14ms refresh rate. Seems to have good reviews from users though.

But I believe that too is just backlit LED .

[Arfa Daily]

Yes indeedy. I think there was maybe a degree of misunderstanding when I suggested that people might be a bit more savvy about this terminology. I don't for one minute think that Joe Average Punter, would have the slightest understanding of the actual differences in the technology, but I think that most would know that the TV sets that you buy now are either "LCD" or "Plasma". I am pretty sure that most will also have heard of - and many will have had experience of - LED lighting, not the least because all the kids fit (what used to be illegal) blue LEDs in their car lights now, and all have seen LED Christmas lights. So I think that they might well think that a "LED TV" was actually something different from the current norm. Add to that a bit of sharp salesman point-of-sale hype, and I think that the whole thing is, as was my original point long, long ago, more than a little misleading. Considering some of the cases that William S cited in a thread last year, that had been successfully prosecuted as being misleading in the U.S., I am surprised that someone has not picked up on it over there ...

Arfa

[William Sommerwerck]

This is one of those cases in which the people most-likely to object to the advertising are those aware of the ad's meaning, who therefore don't see it as a misrepresentation.

Sets that generate the image directly using LEDs or OLEDs are not perceived as having fundamental advantages *, so even if the display is incorrectly called "LED", rather than "LED backlight", it is not seen as misleading.

Does that make any sense?

PS: Samsung's Website calls it an "LED TV" -- as distinct from "LCD TV" -- which is at least confusing.

PPS: I've seen it in Fry's, and was not particularly impressed.

• Other than being able to display a "true" black.

[The Natural Philosopher]

If that's what you are up to, get a full frame film camera.

[Bob Larter]

Well, obviously, but it's better than nothing.

[Bob Larter]

I spent many years in the service industry, & I have a stock of similar stories. My favourites are the colour-blind guy who complained (under warranty) about his colour printers colour rendition, the lawyer who sued my employer over his floppy disk drive, & the LOL[0] who was upset that her inkjet wouldn't work without power.

Ayup. I really enjoyed being a field tech, even with all the loons you see in that job.

[0] Little Old Lady.