You know how people have been raving about the 2.4-million dot viewfinder Sony squeezed into the NEX 7 camera1? A tiny optical viewfinder that manages to pack in almost three times more dots than found in the highest-end camera viewing screens?
Well, that 'finder is now officially lame, a crappy 8-bit-style pixelated mess in the face of a magnificent new screen from French company MicroOLED, which sports a staggering 5 million dots (remember, though, dots doesn't equal pixels. For a regular RGB display, divide by three).
The MicroOLED 'finder is aimed at high-end cameras and video cameras, and may also come with RGBW (RGB plus white) pixels for a 100,000:1 contrast ratio (ten times Sony's). This new chip is clearly a "retina" display for close-up viewing, and could make the optical viewfinder obsolete.
Think about it: with such high resolution, optical viewfinders lose their one advantage. Now you can ditch extra lenses and/or mirrors, you can zoom, overlay info on the screen and still manually focus as easily as with optical. Bonus: the optical 'finders in even high-end compacts like the Canon G-series suck to the point of uselessness. They will be needed no more.
It's unlikely that you'll see this in your new camera very soon, but the tech will surely trickle down fast enough. I can't wait.
MicroOLED introduces highest pixel density OLED microdisplay [MicrOLED via Imaging Resource]
- Yes, technically it’s an add-on viewfinder, but still, right?↩
