About Thomas Fitzgerald

Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography. 

Mirrorless cameras and being a glasses wearer

Mirrorless cameras and being a glasses wearer

As much as I love mirrorless cameras, there's one thing about the current designs that unfortunately is a bit of a problem for me. The issue is the viewfinder. My problem is not the electronic display itself, but rather the physical design of the viewfinder. Most of the mirrorless cameras that I've used are a real pain to use in bright light if you're a glasses wearer.

The design of most viewfinders leaves very little covering in terms of the eyepiece in front of the display. If you're looking through them without glasses you can generally get your eye pretty close and block most of the ambient light hitting the screen, but with glasses on, you can't. This lets light in which shines as glare across the EVF screen which in turn makes it very hard to see what you're framing and to judge exposure. Instead you have to rely on the histogram and sometimes even that isn't enough. Sometimes when parts of the scene are dark, it can be difficult to see at all, making even basic framing quite difficult. I talked about this issue on my post about my recent trip to Nice, where the sun was particularly bright and it was very difficult to see the image in the EVF.

To be fair, I haven't used every Mirrorless camera, and I'm sure some of the newer cameras are better. The X-T1 and the Sony A7 series both have bigger physical eyepieces and so its easier for your eye to cover the opening and not let glare in, but many of the smaller cameras have this issue.

I'm not sure what the solution is. In the past I've made my own eyepiece for my NEX-7 which solved the problem on that camera. My Fuji X-E1 is particularly troublesome in bright light, and I'm not sure how easy it would be jerry-rig a fix either as the shape makes it difficult to create anything around. Plus there's no option to remove the existing eyepiece meaning it would be difficult to create custom one. What i'd love to see is manufacturers or even a third party offering custom eyepieces for popular mirrorless cameras. I know some do exist but I can't find any descent ones for the models I use. Perhaps as the EVF screens become brighter with better coatings and with better contrast ratios, this will become less of a problem.

Obviously this isn't a total deal breaker, or I'd have stopped using Mirrorless cameras ages ago, but it's something I hope manufacturers will address in the future.

Are you a glasses wearer and a mirrorless camera owner? Have you noticed this problem and if so, have you come across any solutions? Let us know in the comments below


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