Despite the huge effort that goes into designing digital cameras, they still suffer from some obvious and important flaws. On a £100 device, this probably isn’t that crucial, but if you are in the market for a £2,000 camera, and trying to take hard-to-get shots, the user interface shouldn’t be getting in your way.
Neither should your nose. Most ‘professional’ SLR’s don’t (yet) provide you with a preview screen at the back, so the user is obliged to peer through a viewfinder. Sometimes this even comes equipped with a nice squishy eyepiece. The problem is that lots of photographers have noses that make using an eyepiece damn near impossible. One solution would be create two large triangular recesses in the camera back on either side of the eyepiece. I guess you’d describe such a design as quirky or even ‘organic.’
Today’s invention, however, is to place the final eyepiece lens at the end of a tube, sticking out from the back of the camera and thus allowing space for anyone’s nose. It might even come with a foam rubber pad which could be rotated about its axis to provide a cushion/brace for either cheek to press against (even when the camera body is being held at an angle).
For extra benefit, it might be possible to mould a cheekpiece for each individual (just as with boil-in-the-bag gumshields) and to make it transparent in order not to obscure the data on the rear display.
