OM-1 MkII: The Diopter Adjustments

The viewfinder contains a lot of “stuff.” It’s at the top of the camera and houses the flash, the hot shoe for the external flash and inside, it contains the display, which according to OM Systems, gives a vertical/horizontal coverage of approximately 100% (page 2 of the official OM Systems spec sheet). It also includes the electronic viewfinder with it’s 5.7 million dots.

The viewfinder is designed so that the eye is 21mm away from the eyepiece. If your eye is too far from it, you will not be able to see the whole viewfinder.

For those of us who wear glasses (and I’m not talking about contact lenses), there’s a huge gap between my eyeglasses and the viewfinder. The gap is far more than the 21mm the viewfinder was designed for. It’s more like 26mm or 28mm. We are supposed to take our glasses off and use the camera without the glasses.

There’s a small diopter adjustment wheel at the top right of the viewfinder to adjust so we can see with the viewfinder without the need for glasses. The adjustment can be between -2 and +4 diopters. This is mostly for short-sighted people. To adjust, you are supposed to activate any control to look inside the viewfinder and use the diopter adjustment wheel to bring the viewfinder in focus for your eye.

The problems are:

1. I’m not short-sighted, I have astigmatism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astigmatism.
2. I’m crazy and can’t use contact lenses. I’m deadly afraid of putting contact lenses in my eyes. It’s completely irrational like all phobias. And then what would I do with my glasses when I want make photos?
3. There’s no marking on the adjustment wheel to show zero for resetting it. I tried and couldn’t reset it back to the original, the zero, setting. I had to get somebody with “good” eyesight to help me reset it back to zero.