I've heard a few times that the Leaf Afi screen is not good in sunlight, even being steered away from it for outside work by a dealer. But, Rune, an outdoor shooter, didn't mention it in his comments so he seems to be satisfied with it.

Does anyone have experience shooting the current Leaf backs outside? Is it just direct sun that's the problem? If you shade the screen with a hat or your body like I do with my M8, is it then OK? Can you use it to check focus, exposure and composition?

Thanks for any help,

Mitchell

Hi Mitchell,

I do have some problem viewing the AFi screen in brigh sunlight. But shading it with hands on both sides makes it well readable.

I recieved your question, and in my opinion the brightness of the screen should not be a desicive criterion when choosing between Sinar/AFi etc. There are so many more important attributes to consider.

Best Regards,

Rune Molnes

YOu can purchase a Leaf collapsible shade that snaps onto the back. This really helps. To be honest I think all the back LCDs are hard to see in bright light.

Mitchell:

Lee Filters sells a very nice compendium shade for the Leaf that clips right on to the back. The AFi does have the clip slots in a slightly differnt position, so a new version will be needed and I don't know if that is being produced yet, but I can check.

Steve Hendrix
www.ppratlanta.com/digital.php

Yes they're working on one, it should be available soon

Yair

While the screen loses contrast in sunlight, the histogram is so key to judging the shot while overlayed on the image. If you aren't using strobes for outdoor shooting, it's very easy to judge that a shot is well within the histo without clipping, then you're good. The Aptus/AFi backs have a broad enough dynamic range that unless you have major highlights from reflections or direct sun in frame, most things fit well within without clipping on either end.

I find after using an Aptus for a while that I can just gauge the shots, knowing what the scene has to what is rendering in the histo. When balancing strobes with daylight, shading the screen is usually enough to manage.

Leaf should make a 640 x 480 touch screen. Look at Nikon D300 or D3, their 3" screen are so fine. Cannot believe a $36000 Leaf Afi7 uses such a horrible screen

All of the medium format back screens I have used have a "challanged" preview in comparison to the dslrs.

A lot of this is just the preview in the file which doesn't seem to have a great deal of processing.

At low iso, under softer light they all read pretty well, but with direct light and bright highlights they blow out.

At high iso the preview can be a snow storm as there is no noise reduction applied (I guess).

I shoot medium format tethered about 90% of the time and honestly it shouldn't matter though it can be a shock to look at the lcd and see blow out, then look over at the computer and see that everything is fine, or even the white are underexposed rather than over.

I think this comes from the original mindset that medium format was origianlly studio oriented, dslrs were for location or sports and now they have somewhat merged as dslrs are used in studio tethered and medium format is used on location.

For the "next" upgrade in medium format I would love to see better useable previews as well as better lcds. Larger doesn't help much if the preview is goofy and in fact the little Leica M8 produces one of the best previews of any camera and the zoom feature is probably the easiest and most functional to use.

Before medium format just tacks on a larger screen, there is a lot more that needs to be adressed. All the backs should have a preview visable when tethered. The Phase does this, the Leaf doesn't and my 1ds2 doesn't. This is a huge time saver and keeps the photographer from running over to the computer every 10 shots to see if it's in range.

Also the software in medium format needs much more adjustment.

Last week I finished up tethered to 3.78 and running a hot folder to Lightroom. It's not that lightroom produces a superior file, but it does allow a preset that shows a client/AD a much closer representation of how a file will looked when finally worked in photoshop, since you can really adjust all the tones and even vignette.

Working this way is a little cumbersome as the lightroom previews are way behind 3.78 in speed, but on an ad shoot where you want the AD to go Wow, rather than "uh ok now are you going to change this in post", software from the medium format manufacturers should have all the useability of a program like lightroom.

Really it would be better if there was more standards in setting up a file. V4 doesn't read the settings in 3.78, lightroom doesn't read any settings other than white balance and iso and even those are different.

In fact it would be great if you could set a preset look in lightroom, photoshop, v4, whatever and then just apply those to the back where whatever you shoot looks the same from camera lcd to computer screen.


JR

Thanks for the clarification. I am glad you cleared things up before he purchased one.

So do I.

"...in my opinion the brightness of the screen should not be a desicive criterion when choosing between Sinar/AFi etc. There are so many more important attributes to consider.

Best Regards,

Rune Molnes"


Thanks Rune,

I wonder if you could take us through your reasoning in choosing the AFI. I remember in your post on the AFI, you consider the Leaf back giving the best Image Quality. Can you describe why, and list other reasons if you had them.

Thanks so much for your very helpful posts.

And thanks to the others on this thread.

Best,

Mitchell

I have the bellows shade and it does work very well. The clips that hold them onto the back seems very poor on mine and it already is quite loose after only a few uses. Considering the price I would of expected a better fit.

I only use the histogram for judging the exposure, the display is really only useful for composition and I would rely on it.