When we turned our back on DSLRs we gave up a lot of things we shouldn’t have

One of these is the optical viewfinder. When mirrorless cameras first came out, almost all of my tech journo colleagues embraced electronic viewfinders for showing what the camera will actually capture, and for the mechanical simplicity of the mirrorless design. I wasn’t so sure, but I couldn’t really explain why. Now I think I can.

After years of shooting with mirrorless cameras exclusively, I’ve got back into DSLRs again. I use both side by side, so this is a live comparison of modern technologies, not some misty-eyed withdrawal into the past.

I can now see what it is exactly about EVFs that bothers me.

1. When I’m taking pictures with a viewfinder, I like to see the world as it is, not how the camera THINKS it looks. That might seem like a terribly small distinction, but it matters to me. I like the digitisation of the world to happen AFTER I’ve taken the picture, not BEFORE. While I’m taking pictures I like to feel visually connected with the real world, not separated from it by a digital screen.
2. Like a lot of photographers, I guess, I did feel I had to accept the logic that an EVF shows what the camera will capture. But it doesn’t. What you’re seeing in the EVF is simply a tiny digital screen doing its best to display the image as best it can. From my experience, these screens don’t show the depth of shadow detail or subtlety of highlights that the camera will actually capture. Very often I’ve used exposure adjustments I didn’t need to because of the limited dynamic range of the EVF. Besides, if you’re shooting RAW, all the EVF will show you is the camera’s on-the-fly JPEG conversion, not what the RAW file will capture. In the end, you learn to trust your sensor and use the EVF as a broad guide at best.
3. You can see what the camera has captured without an EVF anyway. Can you wait half a second for your camera to display an instant review on its rear screen? You can? Then a DSLR is no problem. Worst case is that you see the image and have to reshoot, but I’ve done that plenty of times with mirrorless cameras too.
4. Blackout-free shooting with mirrorless cameras either brings a slow-down in continuous shooting speeds or a hike in price. Now you might say that DSLR viewfinders will never be blackout-free because of the mirror action. It turns out, though, that the high-speed ‘flicker’ of a DSLR mirror in burst mode is perhaps a distraction, but does not actually interrupt the way you follow action in any meaningful way. Your view is live and lag-free. It’s optical, so what you see is what’s happening millisecond by millisecond, not just what the camera’s sensor, processor and EVF can keep up with.
5. Lastly, this is the thing that perhaps bothers me the most. No, it’s not the huge loss of battery life from EVFs – battery life is a whole different article – it’s the replacement of highly effective mechanical engineering with electronics. Why? Where does this love affair with electronics come from? We seemed to have swapped gears and levers and springs for a kind of helpless obeisance to a huge and faceless semiconductor industry. I know DSLRs need the semiconductor industry too, but let’s not just abandon perfectly good mechanical solutions where they still work.

This is not an anti-technology rant. Mirrorless cameras have brought many features, technologies and ways of working that we didn’t have before. But they have also brought compromises, difficulties and sacrifices. If you need these specific advantages that mirrorless cameras offer, then use them. But many of us don’t. And for us, mirrorless cameras have brought compromises, weaknesses and annoyances that we never had with our DSLRs.