Casio EX-FH20 Viewfinder

Casio FH20 Viewfinders

The FH20 has both a rear-panel LCD and an electronic viewfinder (EVF). Both worked quite well in my use, and the EVF even did a better job of holding onto highlight detail than I'm accustomed to seeing. (This is one of my biggest beefs with EVFs, namely that they tend to lose detail in highlights, often making it difficult to compose shots properly relative to cloud detail.) The refresh rate on both displays was good (important in a camera to be used for capturing fast action), and the EVF's screen had excellent resolution: Its pixels were small enough that I was almost entirely unaware of them. (I was surprised to read in the manual that Casio only rates the EVF's resolution as "equivalent to 201,600 dots," it seemed sharper than that to me. Looking at it closely, I think it uses an LCOS sequential-color display chip, which as full-color (RGB) pixels, as we also saw on the new Panasonic G1.)

As is true of most cameras with electronic viewfinders, framing was very accurate with the Casio FH20, regardless of whether I used the EVF or the rear-panel LCD. Again, an important characteristic with a camera for shooting sports: You need to be able to see exactly what the camera is seeing, no more, no less.

As an eyeglass-wearer, I also appreciated the nice, high eyepoint of the FH20's EVF optics: I could see the entire active area of the viewfinder display without having to mash my eyeglass lenses against the viewfinder bezel. That said though, the viewfinder screen appears rather small and cramped, even compared to the viewfinders on cropped-frame DSLRs. It's certainly usable enough, but might feel a little claustrophobic to someone whose other camera is an SLR. On the other hand, the dioptric adjustment worked well, able to compensate for even my extreme nearsightedness (close to 20:180). I did find the dioptric adjustment knob a little difficult to work, though, as it was so close to the viewfinder, and on the wrong side for a right-eye-dominant person like myself. Not that big an issue, because it's an adjustment you don't make all that often, but I did find it annoying.