The chinese website ZOL says the upcoming A99 could use a new viewfinder with 720p, ultra-fast response time (less than 0.01ms) and super brightness (greater than 200 cd/m2).
Here are two more screenshot with the new viewfinder specs:
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60 Responses
this will be interesting 😀
make it 100Hz and 500cd/m – and you got almost perfect A99 viewfinder
500cd/m?? i think, you meant a almost perfect eyesight-killer 😉
why do you say “eyesight-killer”?
Because 500cd/m is a lot to bright especially if you look at it that closely, exposing the eye to big amounts of light isn’t very good for your eyesight, you wouldn’t look straight into the sun all day long, would you.
Don’t forget that those 200 or 500 cd/m2 at the screen are “spread” a lot by the optics magnifying the image. So by the time it reaches your eye it’s a LOT less. And it’s nearly too dim as can be seen with the A77, when you’re shooting outside and bring the eye to the EVF, it has to get used to the dimmer view. Maybe 1000 would be the target…
500cd/m² is total nonsense the standard of sRGB is 120cd/m², brighter Backlight will result in poorer Black reproduction. 200cd/m² already a lot. Blackpoint and Color Gamut and Reproduction are a lot more important then something as trivial as brightness.
I still wonder how long EVF’s will Last, especially considering that they are OLED, is a downside for me as those are traditionally known to last very little time.
Leaking backlight (along with slow response time) is a problem of LCD displays.
OLED doesn’t have backlight and OLED display is basically array of tiny light emitting diodes and light produced by bright areas/points doesn’t affect to blackness of areas where diodes don’t produce light. (except through light scattered inside viewfinder)
And actually capability for overkill high brightness wouldn’t be automatically bad because use at lower brightness should give lot longer operating life.
You’re right I was thinking about the way displays are traditionally built, my bad.
Still I’m a little worried about the durability of such a screen.
When It comes to light loss that would mainly occur if the image is scaled up.
Still haven’t paid the credit card bill on my a77 and every little snippet about possible a99 inclusions has me salivating.
The condemnation of many consumers of technology 🙂
Same here Ben on my A65. The EVF is new to me, and fantastic IMO. Sheesh, I guess within 5 years there will be a 1080p OLED. Wow….
Uhm, the current nex-7 and a77 oled EVF has a tad more pixles than your 5 year ahead 1080p viewfinder.
Don’t fall for the Sony marketing bla bla and confuse dots with pixels. Sony’s cheating here. The A77 EVF has less pixels than a 720p or 1080p screen.
According to my calculations the live feed from the sensor should be 41% bigger than on the A77(when both are set to 3:2, and the live view is using max of the viewfinder), but the pixel density will be roughly 33% lower.
A77 viewfinder is 1024*768, 720p doesn’t seem to be much more than that.
Dots are not pixels. You need to be careful in comparing them.
This new EVF is 1280 x 720 x 3 (for RGB), or 2.7m dots. The bigger issues aren’t resolution once we get to this size, but refresh and the size and the alignment of the dots.
A 720P “size” like this EVF has is convenient for another reason: many of the sensors are running 720P natively for video (1080P is created by scaling). This cuts down internal processing a bit, which can result in a “faster response.”
A couple of other points: this looks like a sensor primarily designed for video. The native color space is NTSC, not sRGB.
The size seems rather large, so I’m wondering what it was really designed for. With that large a dot size (4 x 12 micron, or 12 microns square for a full RGB position) it seems a bit coarse for a close-in DSLR viewfinder. I’d guess that it was designed for the longer distance of most video camera eye-level finders. That’s not to say it can’t be used in a DSLR, especially a big one with a big prism. It’s just another hint at who Sony might have thought the real customer was. Remember, even a wildly successful A99 wouldn’t use enough of this part to justify making it.
Come on Andrea!! 🙂 This is what we want to hear and dream about.. A99!! A-mount FFs!!!
720P stands for 0.92 mega pixels,
the a77 has 2.4 million dots,
The question is the a77 2.4 million dots are considered pixels? or you have to divide them by RGB – means 2.4 divide by “3”=0.8 mega pixels?
Yeah I think it is something like that.
1024 x 768 x 3 (dots per pixel) = 2,359,296 dots.
The A55 has a 800×600 viewfinder. The A77 has a 1024×768 viewfinder. This would be a 1280×720 viewfinder.
This viewfinder does not appear to have a greater pixel density just a different ratio.
I have used the A77. It does have a great EVF but the image is still significantly inferior to the A900 OVF.
Why would the A99 have a 16:9 viewfinder?
It woulden’t this EVF is designed for Video not for Stills Cameras, if you look at the Actual 4:3 Image Resolution the A77 can display a higher resolution image then this viewfinder in a 4:3 displaying mode, as it displays 720 and not 768 pixels horizontally.
Sony make two FF models. One SLT with the 720p OLED viewfinder and one DSLR with the prism from the A900 and see which sells better.
Sony the reason why the A900 was a failure was not that it was a bad camera. It was simply that it did not have liveview or a movie mode.
The A900 was no failure. And I only know a few people with FF cameras that actually use live view or movie mode or even WANT such features. The reason, the A900 didn’t sell that good compared(!) to a Nikon D3/D700 or Canon 1D/5D is simple: Photographers already have a lens collection. A system change makes only sense in very rare conditions. The other reason for Sony being behind in the professional market is the lack of world-wide(!) on-site support. If you need your DSLR as your main income, you are required to have such professional fast support.
the a900 was a failure?? I say Sony did pretty damn good for it’s first FF IMO
No way – live view is the future for serious landscape / tripod and studio work. Its actually the only reason I bought a 5D 2 instead of an A900.
Precise focus is much, much better with an enlarged high resolution live view rather than using a small, dark OVF (which even an A900 has at F8-11 at dusk)or ‘guesstimating’ via hyper focal distance or lens scales (if your lens has one).
I’m surprised people still claim live view isn’t for serious use – its far superior. In many ways.
The a900 was no failure!! It is still the best a mount camera that Sony has made so far!!!
Sales wise the A900 was a failure and the reason is the lack of liveview and movie mode. It doesn’t matter whether you would use those features or not. Canon released the 5D2 and people went crazy over its movie mode and the A900 was left in it’s shadow.
I have used the A900 and it is a great camera. I wish it had sold better, maybe Sony then would have not dumped DSLR’s
stop saying trash, why you wanna look at the live view while you’ve got such a big viewfinder, movie mode not necessary! 24.6mp is enough, why so greedy?
To release a camera without a movie mode is suicide. Unfortunately you’ll not see another Sony camera with a viewfinder as beautiful as the one in the A900. Shame.
Fortunately Sony are onto a winner with NEX.
The EVF refresh speed will eliminate any latency/jello effect.
This has A 16:9 ratio, ==> not fpr A99, but maybe for the next video cameras
+1. This is not for the a99, but for a future video camera.
The jello effect is a problem with the speed of the readout from the cmos chip, no EVF refresh is going to change that.
So pretty soon we are going to be streaming HD movies to the EVF?
I think that is for sony personal 3d viewer HMZT1….
16:9 is just not really the idea for camera
Argggg….it’s only 8-bit.
I was really hoping for the first 10-bit VF.
RED Digital already has a 720p EVF, so this is not the first of its kind.
Great updates Andrea. Good to see all the improvements made by Sony all in the right directions.
According to my calculations, this new EVF only has 11% more pixels (RGB) to display a 3:2 aspect ratio image. The difference between the two EVFs will only be really significant when displaying 16:9; here the new EVF uses 56% percent more pixels than the old one.
Due to the new EVF module’s aspect ratio I suspect it is more suited to a high end movie camera. I guess it’s also conceivable that it will be used in a future NEX model. The advantage would be that both the external screen and the EVF would then have the same aspect ratio and hence the same layout for on-screen information.
720p is 1280×720, which is 16:9. That’s great for video, but not so great for 3:2 stills.
Sounds to me like this viewfinder is for an upcoming camcorder, NOT the A99.
Exactly, no dice on 720p. The current 1024×768 resolution is preferable for stills.
However, this could be a good EVF for video cameras; just keep it away SLT’s and NEX’s.
Why? Having black bars is only an issue if it means losing resolution, but in this case the resolution loss would be minimal, but the gain would be great when shooting in 16:9 (stills or video). Also I would expect this to be slightly wider physically, with a similar pixel pitch to the current 1024 x 768 EVF. Plus being OLED you shouldn’t even be able to see those extra pixels when they are ‘off’ (black bars) – it would simply be like they didn’t exist in the first place.
It would be even better if it were 1366 x 768 – this way there would be no loss compared to A77/A65/NEX-7/NEX-5N EVF, just gain
Well, I must say sony really commit herself in the SLT game. One of the big advancement is really the EVF. The EVF on my A77 is simply amazing, even as the user of A850, I must say Sony has done a good job in the EVF department.
Then again, they really have to do work hard with the ISO performance else the canikon bandwagon will have something to complain about~ XD
This is a 16:9 viewfinder with almost the same pixel count as the one in A77 only different ratio. This is for sure a video viewinder for new camcorders and NOT a camera viefinder as all high end camera still use 4:3 ratio. I think everybody will scream if they put this in A99 and you will have black bars on the side when taking “standard” 3:2 photos.
On A77 they switched back even the LCD from the 16:9 type on NEX and A33/A55, and on LCD it’s not so important because you allways have additional stuff which you don’t show on viewfinder.
is it not possible that if you choose to shoot stills then it would crop back to the 3:2 ratio on the view finder??? i would think so… in that case you can shoot videos at 16:9 in the A99 and have a bigger screen while still be able to shoot stills at 3:2 ( which would appear a little bigger on this VF)
Like I said, you will get black bars on the side of your viewfinder same as you get on a TV watching old SD programs on an HDTV set. Highly unlikely for a pro camera (where photo comes first and video is second). Different story for a camcorder where video is first function.
The big one is definitely lower res and lower pixel density. Definetely not for SLT, let alone FF! It’s for video cameras.
Smaller one: same res, more illumination, prob. faster response time.
Key improvement for a99 evf would be contrast. Everything else is just fine as is with a77 evf.
I love the 16:9 format, almost more than the 3:2 that works for almost everything. It isn’t widely used in still photography but it gives an overview vision closer to reality.
True, but 99 % esspecialy PRO photographers shoot in 3:2 at least for now.
Yes, and why so?
One reason is maybe that the drawing area of round lens is round! That means that a square image – if not round – would best exploit the optic’s drawing. And the wider the shape of image, the greater part of it is on “edge area” where the quality is doomed to be worse.
Sony has already a 720p OLED-“Viewfinder” in use for their 3D-OLED Head-Mounted Display:
http://www.sony.de/hub/hmd-videobrillen?wep_landing=
Hopefully Sony make a DSLT and DSLR for full frame.
Are any manufacturers making an eye-cup attachment for the Sony OLED EVF?
This 720p OLED is already being used in the Sony HMZ-T1 3D goggles.
I am interested at the performance of the OLEDs at dark environment.
One more thing. This is not even a Sony Announcement for an EVF.
This is a leak, and about the OEM part, not the EVF itself.
Come on Andrea, take it easy on us mortals 🙂
The ECX331A is the 4/3 display used in the A65, A77 and NEX-7 EVFs. The ECX332A is the widescreen version used in the soon-to-be-available HMZ-T1 video headset. Different ratios, different purposes. Nothing new here…
The 4/3 version is good for still cameras, while the 16/9 version would be put to good use in video camcorder EVFs. If the A99 gets one of those it’s the first one. A higher resolution wouldn’t really be useful, as a larger FOV would be needed, and not easily achieavable.
Higher brightness would be great though, A77 is dark when putting the eye to it coming from to “sunny day” levels.
No evidence they’ll sell them to OEMs, even if I’d wish they did for my particular field…
This is old news. The 720p OLED is used in Sony’s HMZ-T1 head-mounted display.
http://store.sony.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&partNumber=HMZT1
It might be adequate for the A99, but I hope one of Sony’s 3 FF models debuting next year still has an OVF. Perhaps the flagship 36MP model will?