New EVF makes it clear: the optical viewfinder’s days are numbered

For years, pundits and industry leaders alike have predicted the end of the optical viewfinder, but enthusiast and pro photographers have stubbornly clung to them for their benefits over electronic viewfinders. Today, a new microdisplay from French company MicroOLED S.A.S. promises to take a big step towards erasing those advantages.

MicroOLED's latest microdisplay model has a resolution of over five million square dots, with a dot pitch of 4.7 microns, and is said to have no gaps between pixels. That's an astoundingly high resolution -- it's more than double that of Sony's XGA (1,024 x 768 pixel) OLED panel, which we've seen in the NEX-7, SLT-A77 and SLT-A65, as well as the FDA-EV1S viewfinder accessory that's available for the NEX-5N. We were already impressed with the resolution of Sony's EVF, which offer a very sharp image that makes for very easy manual focusing, even without zooming in on the live view feed. With double that resolution, the new MicroOLED microdisplay has likely surpassed the limits of the human eye, in terms of resolution at least.

Do note, though, that the press release refers to pixels rather than dots. We think this is likely because the display is also offered in a monochrome version, which has a total resolution of 2,560 x 2,048 greyscale pixels, with a 5:4 aspect ratio. For the full 24-bit color version, capable of displaying around 16 million unique colors, resolution is stated as SXGA. That's 1,280 x 1,024 pixels, suggesting a four-dot-per-pixel design, likely RGBW. (There's also a slight inconsistency between the claimed 5.4 million dot resolution, and the 5.24 million dots implied by the array resolution.)

An RGBW array would probably explain the extremely high contrast ratio of 100,000:1, an impressive ten times the range of Sony's OLED display. This should help MicroOLED's display answer one of the remaining criticisms of electronic viewfinders, namely that their dynamic range is too narrow to show the nuances of the contrasty, real-world scenes most photographers are accustomed to shooting in.

Other desirable attributes of the MicroOLED display include low power draw of 0.2 watts, and 96 percent uniformity.

Of course, the comparison to Sony's OLED viewfinders is hardly fair. MicroOLED is said to be targeting uses such as professional cameras and camcorders, the defense and medical industries (night vision and head-mounted displays), etc. By contrast, Sony's display is already affordable enough to appear in cameras that are affordable to enthusiast photographers. We draw the parallels only because Sony's display has by far the highest resolution we've yet seen in cameras available at retail. These technologies have a way of trickling down surprisingly quickly, though, and that leaves us with the distinct impression that the clock is ticking for the optical viewfinder...