LCD Reviews

The Canon 7D has gorgeous back LCD screen. Even 3 years later it's one of the best and one of the biggest around with its 3” LCD screen. There are very few cameras with 3.2” screens. The problem is that for reviewing the photos it's not that great, I can see the framing, I can see see which areas have the clippings, but let's face it, almost all photos look good on a 3” screen.

The question is what gets displayed on the LCD review screen? It's not the photo itself whether it is raw or jpeg. It is the preview of the photo that gets displayed on the LCD review screen.

I can already hear people mentioning that “real photographers” analyse the photo not by the look but by the histogram. It's just like “real men” don't eat quiche. The problem is that the histogram usually changes according to the ambient light. The histogram is for the image displayed on the LCD panel.

By default, the brightness of the LCD changes according to the ambient light. You can test it yourself. Go into review mode, then press the info button enough times until you see the histogram. With the same photo:

1. Go in the review mode in a dark closet and look at the histogram.
2. Turn off the review mode.
3. Then go in the bright sunshine or a very brightly light room and look at the same picture.

Notice the difference in the histogram. The “best” is to set the LCD brightness to manual and to set it to something around the middle. That way you will get a consistent view that you will get used to and will correlate to when viewing on the computer screen.

Also the Auto LCD brightness leads to misinterpreting the image. An image can look dark on the LCD, leading to exposing brighter, only to find out later that the original image was fine.

I find the LCD screen on the camera to be small when reviewing the images. According to my Lightroom stats 38% of my photographs are portrait/vertical. By Auto Rotating both on the LCD of the camera and on the screen, I loose another 50% of the screen, so I set my Auto Rotate: On Computer (only).