Epson announces mass production of 4.41m dot LCD likely used in Leica SL

Here an OVF has a big advantage over an EVF as with an OVF you can more easily see in between the shots as soon as the mirror flips down it will temporarily give you back a view on the subject only to be obscured as soon as the mirror flips up again.

The OVF therewith gives you the ability to track your subject much more easily as there is no electronics involved in 'viewing' the subject.

@Don Diafragma,
I guess this OVF advantage will not last long as electronics improves at a fast pace...

@pictureAngst - they should be, but the term 'dots' has sometimes been used to mean sub-pixels.

@pictureAngst -- they're not using them interchangeably in the article. "The 4.41m dot unit offers an SXGA+ display: 1,400 x 1,050 pixels." 1,400 x 1,050 = 1.47M, not 4.41M.

Yes...1400x1050x3(RGB)=4.41million dots.The actual resolution is 1.41MP not more.

Yes, that's correct 1.141MP, but that makes a whopping 2651 pixels per inch with a screen diagonal of 0.66". And that is not making you feel that you are looking at such 'low' resolution display.

Dots and pixels should not be used interchangeably. Although a dot is a 'picture element,' it's important to be able to make the distinction exactly to avoid it being misleading.

We've been fairly consistent in avoiding conflating dots and pixels and I'm pretty sure CIPA now demands its members follow that same distinction.

I've gone back to correct any instance where we've repeated Leica's non-standard usage.

Thank you Richard Butler. I don't think it was you fault in the first place, Leica was misleadingly promoting it with "4,4 MP" phrase.

Ah I see my mistake - apologies to the OP.

Fossum will call all the sensor photosites "pxiels". And in this case, it's right -- they are monochrome pixels, used to derive further tri-stimulus pixels.

You could go either way on the display "pixels" as well. There is no fact of the matter. The only thing you can't do is have it both ways!

No, the photo sites (or pixels) on a sensor aren't comprised of three sub-pixels (or dots). A 42 MP sensor has 42 million monochrome pixels. Above that is a Bayer array that gives us 21 million green pixels, 10.5 million red and 10.5 million blue. The final 42 MP output image is created by interpolating the missing colour values for each pixel, by taking that information from surrounding pixels.

If each pixel in the output image was created from several pixels on the sensor through pixel binning, that would be a closer analogue to the pixels/dots of a display.

That's how I thought a few years ago, but seeing into the future is making a big difference.

With that 'future' I mean that its a real advantage to dial in the settings to your exact liking. You see all: the contrast, brightness, colours and exact Depth Of Field before pressing the shutter button.

So with an EVF you know exactly how your image will look like before taking the photo in contrary to an OVF, which is always a 'guess'.

An OVF is only an advantage in very low, or extremely bright light situations where the brightness of an OVF is unbeatable. But as a general tool and in most situations.l I nowadays prefer the EVF over an OVF.

With these new 'high res' EVF's things only get better.

Every image looks a winner in an OVF.

OVFs are too small. Two years from now these EVFs are going to have 5x magnification.

Enjoy framing through that optical peephole.

EVF's make photography boring

Digital makes photography boring, autofocus makes photography boring, darkrooms make photography boring, video makes photography boring etcetc. Live with it and make the best of it I'd say.

@ Don Diafragma: an EVF can gain up quite a bit making dark situations visible to your eye where an OVF can't.

OVFs give you a great view of what you are taking. An EVF potentially gives you a good view of what the result will be. Unfortunately, EVFs rarely give an accurate view of what the result will be. Yet. One day they may. Currently it's all down to personal preference. I feel more comfortable with an OVF.

"Unfortunately, EVFs rarely give an accurate view of what the result will be."

While OVF NEVER gives an accurate view of what the result will be, to be exact

OVF is only better when large. When dark the EVF is far superior to any OVF. The EVF might not give the exact outcome, but not bad at all and gives a very good confidence with the exposure. Something you cannot with the OVF. Switching from EVF to monitor is seamless, not the same case with OVF to monitor and the AF takes a beating.
Shooting with the OVF and EFV are two different experiences. OVF can be more pleasing, at least when it is relatively bright out, but the OVF offers more information and more creative opportunities.
Not to mention the advantages of not dealing with a mirror.

@ Pandimonium
Please state what get you work with and what experience you have With OVF and EVF. Your sarcasm might make you look cool or like a total idiot depending if you can effectively back your comments up.
I seriously doubt you know what you are talking about, which makes you look like a total idiot.

OVFs are still vastly superior for tracking any kind of action and I haven't seen any signs of that improving in the near future. It would be nice to see a DSLR with either a hybrid OVF/EVF or at least the option to attach a hotshoe mounted EVF or something similar.

@ whumber
"vastly superior" possibly in the very specific situations when you need a high frame rate. Anything else not so much. For instance. Just recently I was shooting ballet dance jumps with my buddy. Me with an A7RII and him with a 1DX. Note that we shoot regularly together sports both with 1DXs and his skills easily match mine. There was not one single time he did a better job than me in capturing the perfect time. A good EVF is very capable. It takes a bit to get used to but there some benefits to it, which I miss when shooting with a DSLR.

Can you clarify? This is only in regards to being in motion and using a phone. For example a quick glance at GPS now and then with Samsung S6 poses very little issue, but several generations of iPhones has always bothered me with LCD displays. OLEDs have refresh rates that are an order of magnitude higher than LCDs. Actually the biggest litmus test for me is viewing screens when its dark and you are in motion. I think the darker darks of OLED and higher refresh rates helps with fatigue tremendously in this situation.

Now, Leica is more about/for lifestyle.

They lost market share in the professional photography market, NOT due to the fact that their cameras are no good.

But too the fact that this market has become highly competitive and digital cameras don't last longer then 2 to 4 years compared to the 20+ years a camera could be used up until a few years ago.

This leads to the fact that ROI (return on investment) for using a Leica is too low nowadays. Not due to the fact that their cameras are bad.

Maybe now the market is in such decline and progress in technology slows down we may see longer life times of digital cameras making using a Leica more interesting again.

But out of cost point of view, not currently and not in the last decade.

re: "The magnification is arguably far more important than the resolution."
Agreed, at least at some reasonable point, which arguably we've already reached (IMO, based on my experience composing and manually focusing with a Sony A7 II).

But: "Mirrorless EVFs are already larger than any DSLR OVF ...."
No. Most of the better EVFs are 0.70x relative to "full-frame" and a couple are 0.78x. Most full-frame OVFs are about 0.71x, some about 0.74x, and the biggest I can think of on a small-format camera is 0.80x on the Nikon F3. I would bet that the metered prism on my Mamiya M645 1000s is bigger than any of these, albeit for a film frame of 56x41.5mm.

I guess I was addressing my comments more at the editors at DPReview than at any marketing flacks. They shouldn't encourage this sort of nonsense by giving it print on their site.

It's kind of like in the bad-old-days of CRT monitors when all the manufacturers measured the screen size by counting the glass that wasn't even visible under the bezel, so that a so-called 15" monitor was really more like 13-something. Since they all did it, nobody really gained an advantage, and it was just annoying.

Most camera review sites have used the dot figures when talking about not only EVF's, but also camera LCD screens. It's just unnecessary.

@Edgar_in_Indy - it could be worse: camera makers used to call each dot a pixel and claim their screens had 230,000 pixels (which is inconsistent with what most people think of as pixels).

We have used the term 'dots' and tried to explain how many actual pixels that is for the whole time I've worked here.

Sometimes it's useful to know how many dots a panel uses. For example some Samsung AMOLED designed used two dots per pixel. Quoting the dot number meant you could tell the difference between 615,000 dots (640 x 480 pixels) and 960,000 dots (640 x 480 pixels) and 1.23m dots (640 x 480 pixels).

And, if all the manufacturers use that terminology on all their marketing, then it would be confusing if we used a totally different number to every other site on the web.

Richard, that's fair enough, but your headline should still refer to the resolution:

"Epson announces mass production of 4.41m dot (1400x1050) LCD likely used in Leica SL"

Richard, I don't know how long you've worked here, but DPR has not always provided the HxV resolution for LCD screens, and has been guilty in the past of referring exclusively to the number or "dots". I'm very happy to see that they are now providing the real world resolution figures.

I don't know when that switch was made, but I remember running into some difficulty when I still owned my Pentax K-x, and was looking at upgrading to the K-r. I had to really dig to find the actual resolution somewhere.

Here on the DPR review, the K-x review only lists the number of dots, and in the review even states "Approx. 230,000 pixels" at one point. And the successor to the K-x, the K-r, was said to have "921k pixels resolution" here on DPR.

But long story short, thank you so much for now providing the normal resolution figures!

@Edgar, it is the same thing. Pixels of the sensor are only monochrome, and you need 4 to make a single color pixel out of them. The layout of pixels on LCD is not different: you need multiple pixels to make the whole color pixel out of them. The only difference is the technical arrogance of the photographers, who ascribe magic properties to the demosaicing algorithms.

If you want to flame LCD about something, flame them about poor color fidelity and the tricks they employ to mimic the colors they are unable to represent natively. But I gather literally nobody on these forums is aware that LCD/OLED tech is literally capped at 6-bits per color channel (IOW real displayed image is 18-bit per pixel; the rest is simulated.)

While you try to calm your inner nerd, I'll ask if you *really* don't see any problem with ambiguously conflating "dots" and "pixels" for no reason other than to produce a more impressive number?

And again, where are image sensors commonly measured in "dots" instead of megapixels? I haven't noticed that.

ThePhilips - Although the pixels on cameras only capture a single colour, most cameras output tends to have full colour information by the time you view it. The sensor itself may only capture 8MP of Green, 4MP of Red and 4MP of Blue, but they'll almost always output files that end up with a R,G and B value by the time you come to view or edit them.

Equally monitor resolutions quote dimensions in terms of pixels that have a red, a green and a blue component.

Edgar/in/Indy - that's slightly embarrassing, since I was here when both of those reviews were written (and contributed to at least one of the two).

Helpfully, we managed to refer to both same figure as both dots and pixels on the same page. (Something I've now corrected).

Panasonic GH series are neither small nor cheap.

brightness on EVF's is too low. no way you can look at them in direct light.

BarnET, what do you mean? There's no sunlight getting onto an EVF when your eye is up against the cup?

I find OLED necessary. If I am out during the day with my Fuji and am wearing polarized glasses, OLED lets me shoot something without having to pause and remove my sunglasses. I trust my camera to meter correctly, but I want to be able to see the framing and LED screens look almost black when viewed with polarized sunglasses..

Each dot is made of three sub-pixels for red, green and blue.
3 x 1.47 = 4.41

3 color dots make one pixel. RGB dots = 1 pixel.