How come no DOF info on view finder??

Myles7 wrote in post #3979788
Erm, what's the fuss?

The bodies have a *button* that stops the lens down to the relevant f-stop. You can actually (woo!) *see* what's in/out of focus rather than have lens-info. converted into some meaningless number....

In my original post, I stated DOF Preview button really doesn't work too well beyond a couple of f-stops, as it looks way too dark for you to be able to SEE the DOF. The numbers wouldn't be "meaningless" if you understood what they were...

Fotoshooter wrote in post #3979550
You do not have to kill to get this camera. It exists on one of the defunct Minolta digital SLR cameras. The DOF readout was seen on the rear LCD.

So I wonder if Minolta has a patent over this function - does anyone know if Sony Alphas have this function?? Alpha owners would NEED this function!

I have an even better idea. You've seen the football games where they superimpose the first down line or a hockey game where they keep the puck highlighted. Well my idea is similar. The camera would use the DOF information and then superimpose it in the viewfinder colored planes indicating the near/far focus plane. For instance: one could by flourescent yellow and one red. Where the plane intersects with the environment you would see a dark line and everywhere else a light shade that is translucent.

I think it would be very cool but doubt it could ever happen as I believe it would possibly require external equipment and a lot of processing power.

gooble wrote in post #3980296
I have an even better idea. You've seen the football games where they superimpose the first down line or a hockey game where they keep the puck highlighted. Well my idea is similar. The camera would use the DOF information and then superimpose it in the viewfinder colored planes indicating the near/far focus plane. For instance: one could by flourescent yellow and one red. Where the plane intersects with the environment you would see a dark line and everywhere else a light shade that is translucent.

I think it would be very cool but doubt it could ever happen as I believe it would possibly require external equipment and a lot of processing power.

plus you would need another camera to give you a view from the top.

I would think a single actual distace readout would be easiest...in inches/feet or cm/m

It would not be perfect or always exactly accurate, heck, nothing else on these cameras are so it wouldnt be too dissapointing....LOL

bbbig wrote in post #3978245
I must be missing something... why is it that Canon (don't think Nikons either) doesn't display DOF field depth calculation on the view finder? It would be GREAT to be able to see what the resulting DOF (both front of and behind the subject focus) as you compose the shot.

Since the camera has ALL the information, focal length, subject distance, and aperture, this should be a relatively a no-brainer to implement. The DOF Preview button is pretty useless for smaller aperture settings!

This would completely eliminate any guesswork around how much DOF you will end up with in the resulting shot. Is there some patent issue I'm not aware of??? Or am I the first to think of this??

To be honest the best thing for this was the old manual focus lenses where the focus arc was large enough to allow a sensible DOF scale, for landscape and general work where you want good DOF control modern AF lenses are a big step backwards. Even for the primes with a DOF scale it is useless because of the small focus arc.

I think the problem with implementing a software DOF scale is the MMI, not working the sums out, that is fairly trivial. One thing I could imagine is a DOF display mode on the rear LCD.

I do wonder why they stopped the ADEP mode that earlier EOS camera apparently had, where you focused on two points and the camera set the required f-stop (and distance?), the ADEP or whatever as implemented on my 20D is a wast of space.

One thing that may be relevant is apparently none of the recent cameras seem to report distance information in the exif like the older ones did. Is this because it is unavailable or unreliable due to some other system change? This would stop the implementation of ADEP or a DOF scale.