5. Viewing & Focusing: A Question Of Philosophy? Continued

As you can see, the display can show a lot of information.

You can display a real-time histogram and highlight overexposed areas with a zebra pattern.

It's also possible to remove the information display from the screen to compose your shot. Note the (optional) grid to facilitate horizontal or vertical alignment.

Focusing has many options that should make you very happy if you like control over this aspect of photography. It works very satisfactorily when the light is good, but not when lighting conditions aren't optimal; under such circumstances, the R1 is far from having the speed and reliability of a digital SLR. (Unfortunately that's been the case with all bridge cameras so far.) There is a manual focus, but it's not a mechanical control. You turn a focus ring and look in the viewfinder, which acts as a magnifier to help you find the focus point. That's often anything but easy, and the fact that you can't lock the ring gives you a feeling of insecurity. The bottom line, then, where focusing is concerned, is that the R1 works well for a bridge camera, but it's far from being as good as an SLR for difficult work. There is LED lighting to aid in focusing when light is low, but operation remains slow, and, naturally, not very discreet. And the LED is offset to the right, which can cause problems under certain circumstances.