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Comment by zerobees | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how this works. If it's a transparent display that just passes through light and adds some overlay information (like a viewfinder on d/SLR cameras of the old), then doesn't the frame change completely depending on the distance you're holding the device at in relation to your face?

It can't be meant to be used with your arm fully outstretched, because that would be an impractically narrow field of view. So how do you "calibrate" your stance to make the capture match the FOV of the glass rectangle you're looking through?

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For a near flat $29 MSRP camera I'm not sure I could come up with better way to have an overlaid viewfinder. The screen itself even looks to be a cheap segmented display, not a grid of pixels.

If you care those things mess up your framing of the shot then you probably don't want a flat $29 camera.

I think the idea is that the display kinda represents the shot, but not well, but if you cared you wouldn’t be shooting with a $29 camera. I mean, it takes 1920x1080 pics, don’t get too picky there, Ansley Adams. :-)

But I agree with you, I don’t see how the “viewfinder” is all that useful, other than “nifty!”.

But if it’s giving you no information about what will actually be in frame you might as well just look in front of you and guess

Most people (even pros) even with expensive cameras and great viewfinders still take mostly garbage shots and only some are good by luck. Same will be true here

Often switching from using your eye to looking through the viewfinder and fiddle with composition is how you ruin a genuine shot and miss the moment.

Also I used a camera without a viewfinder for some years, I guarantee if it's a fixed lens you learn what you get quickly.

Or develop thesense & skill of using it. It clearly has a fixed FOV that's being cropped based on what's on the display.

Humans can learn this stuff, cameras with crude viewfinders have appeared in the past.

Could you not develop the same sense by just looking in front of you without the viewfinder? I don’t see how a frame that doesn’t actually have any relation to what the camera is capturing helps you at all

The frame is a compositional aid, and it does have quite a strict relation to what the camera is capturing.

The best version of your complaint is that the viewfinder does not have accurate frame lines that account for parallax at various distances, which is true, but there are still ways of using the viewfinder to assist in composition.

If you take two or three shots at two meters, and look at what the camera captured versus where your composition was in the frame, you can immediately intuit a baseline for where the frame lines 'should be' on the viewfinder at two meters. "Occupies the bottom right two thirds of the viewfinder" for example.

Without a reference frame, these intuitions (and your aiming of the camera!) are going to be far less accurate.

Seems a lot easier to learn "it's accurate when it's about 8 inches from my face; it's this much off when it is 12 inches away" than to project out a virtual FOV from the camera at an arbitrary position onto the world.

tbh I would probably enjoy a dirt-cheap viewfinder-and-display-less camera, like an even-cheaper charmera. it'd also make a great party-favor thing: hand them out before an event, and optionally gather photos from people at the end.

Is Ansley Adams this generations David Bailey?

I think OP meant ansel adams. The guy died even before most of the crowd in HN was born.

I blame autocorrect, though it could have just been my fat fingers. Sibling has it right: “Ansel Adams”.

(“Ansely Adam’s”, WTF, autocorrect?)

Let me guess, you have an iPhone?

Check out Nostradamus over here. ;-) You have guessed correctly, as I add to the cries of “this used to work, Apple!”

A perhaps similar sort of finder existed on a number of older (eg, first half of the 20th century) cameras, usually as a secondary option or an accessory, for quick shots. They tend to be common additions built into waist level finders because WLFs are slow to use and adding them is cheap; there’s one on the 1939 Praktiflex, as a random example, an early 35mm SLR with a pretty tiny WLF as its primary viewfinder.

Those usually work by having two square windows, the back larger than the front: you know you are looking at them the right way when they line up. They’re very approximate, but they’re meant to be.

Here, the camera has a thickness that is obscured by the face-on photos of it, so I expect it works by a similar principle: if you see the sides of the inside of the screen, you’re misaligned.

It's nowhere near thick enough to handle the huge variety of ranges shown in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duKNwA96J5Y (thickness clearly visible at ~10s)

Not only that, but slight changes to the angle you're holding it will result in dramatically different photo angles, even though you're always seeing the same thing.

It likely comes with instructions like "hold directly in front of you, at exactly 15cm distance, with your left eye closed".

I don’t know but it’s either completely vibes driven or, maybe, it uses a TOF sensor to know how far from your face it is . It has framing cues that seem to adjust, so it’s plausible that it gives you an approximate framing based on the distance from your face. Even multizone TOF sensors are less than $2 these days, so it’s at least plausible.

if you have a 2 dollar budget to make a viewfinder work, just throw in a ten cent plastic lens and be done with it.

That’d be cool if it does that but for this price I doubt it has it even if TOF sensor is cheap.

It's $29, this is a fun gimmick to take pictures of your friends doing bullshit this summer. It's obviously far worse than your phone, the point is that it's fun.

I imagine the same way cheap point-and-shoot film cameras did.

Cheap point and shoot have a prism that if you could take further from the eye would retain the aspect ration. If this camera has a glass that is used to frame the photo it would change the frame based on how close you keep it to your eyes

Those had a viewfinder that restricted your viewing angles and location to enough of a degree that it mostly didn't matter.

Maybe they're using an accelerometer to detect the angle (and possibly even distance from the user, if they can, like if you turn the camera on close to you then move it away) to crop into a sensor that's otherwise exactly like a point and shoot. The image in the site appears to show a transparent classic reflective LCD panel as the viewfinder (like the type you'd see in a basic calculator, without the reflective background), and the camera is ever so slightly above the panel. The math probably isn't that hard for someone trained in how all this works.

Maybe it does measure the distance to your face to work out where to show the viewfinder rectangle...

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