A new thing of beauty

They say you never appreciate something until it is gone. And so it is with the action finder. For those who are not pro or semi-pro photographers those two words will be a mystery. What an "action finder" was was (sic) a specialist pentaprism finder for SLRs that allowed the focusing screen to be viewed some way back from the eyepiece window. Now by someway I don't mean metres - say 50 mm versus the normal <20 mm ...ish. Very good if you are wearing eyeglasses or safety goggles and if things are bouncing around a bit. Now action finders were expensive kit and I doubt many were sold. Not many photographers have ever needed one. These days DSLRs offer nominally the same capability with a live viewing mode - the reflex mirror from which the SLR gets its name is locked up and a subsampled view of the image formed on the chip is displayed on the LCD on the back of the camera. But LCD panels use power that action finders didn't and they disturb the viewfinder centric ergonomics. We get into camera phone territory when the picture taker is holding the camera away at arm's length rather than neatly, squarely, tightly to one eye.
The halfway twix the action finder and a conventional SLR viewfinder was the so called High eyePoint or HP finder. This offered a viewing distance of around 25 mm. If we can't have action finders back could we at least get HP finders. Here is a challenge to Nikon - want to make everyone talk about the D700x when it arrives? Forget the HD video mode - if I want a video camera I'll buy one. Yes, more pixels, take that as read, but NOT at the expense of frame rate - no worse than the D3x thank you. If you really want to blow peoples socks off get them from the left field. Get the real photographers smiling and nodding in agreement. Give us the D700x-HP. Make an already superb interface just that tad brilliant and prepare to make a lot of them.