…because to me the point of my photography is to bring the world outside my apartment, what I see in the world, in my experiences and travels in life that are interesting to my eye and indeed to my brain, back into my apartment, so that I can enjoy those same scenes at my leisure. And in the process of doing that I prefer to carry “portable equipment” and take wide-angle, high-precision shots, with low noise and very high detail. I’m not a big fan of heavy equipment or long lenses beyond what I need to shoot what I can see in available light, I’m a fan of traveling with fair ease and a reasonable load, and taking interesting shots fairly easily, taking shots that of course are very good from a technical point of view, in terms of reproducing the facets of the world that I have seen, that interest me.

I try to be “precise” in what I do and say, and in conveying my thoughts, and of course the same goes for my shooting and I demand precision equipment, good technique and good results. I carry and shoot a fullframe DSLR and superzoom in raw format for that reason and I have a good p&s, that also shoots raw, that I also carry when it is inconvenient to carry the DSLR. Of course the viewfinder is the “subject” and the photograph is an approximation…the art is in getting a good photograph that represents the subject accurately. Of course there is also art in producing a photograph that is artistic for arts’ sake…you are coming at this from the angle that LiveView allows you to see the scene “as the lens sees it” more easily, which I find to be hardly true, or even all that relevant. The relevant issue is to capture the scene that you see/”to take the shot that you want to take” (otherwise we’d all happily shoot p&s’s), and the viewfinder, and the use of the viewfinder, accomplishes that better than Liveview ever could (in fact that is what the DSLR is fundamentally designed to do). Furthermore there are more aspects of the camera at work here than just the lens and the a700 in particular shows that, just like using a p&s vs a DSLR would show that. But using LiveView on a DSLR is like putting tank-tracks on a car and using it as a snowmobile. However the combination of a flip and fold LCD and LiveView on a DSLR does open it up to some useful applications that neither a p&s with a F&F LCD or a DSLR with just a fixed LCD can handle as well. If you want to track fast-moving objects at off-eye camera angles and shoot them in low light, I can’t think of a better combination short of using a HandyCam.

But anyway we are mixing a few concerns here. I just wanted to answer your question, but I see that it is hard to do so without introducing a technical aspect which is outside the scope of your original article. And as such I hope that you will forgive this “long-winded” response But just to complete the picture, here, I find that the affordable digital camera combined with reusable digital storage is what really opened the door, the floodgates, really. Adding LiveView to DSLRs is just expanding that door a little wider. If you took a poll of digital camera owners and asked them what was their first digital camera, I’d bet that 90%+ of them would say “a cheap little point & shoot”. And those cameras all had “Liveview” and no one really worried about whether the live display was 90% or 91% or 95% of the final image (or even whether the LCD mount was flexible). They were happy just to have *anything* that would allow them to shoot and save what they were seeing, with instant playback, without costing them an arm and a leg for the camera and the storage. Cheap Asian-made digital cameras, all with “LiveView”, introduced hundreds of millions of people to the fun of digital photography and led to a true revolution in the industry, both for consumers and manufacturers. And there’s little real practical difference between those early 1 & 2 MP p&s cameras and the 12MP P&S cameras available today. Plus we’ve had PC/notebook remote-control for DSLRs for years now.

in the end I feel that my comments are hardly adding anything of value to your blog…and this issue is on a level of arguing whether a lens should zoom out when turned clockwise vs ccw. The A350 is a minor deal in the overall scope of things. I guess that what I am saying, in a long-winded way, is that I disagree with you in a number of ways.