I still like my optical viewfinder, and my lens collection, so I'm staying with DSLR.
And you are in a very small minority.
I tend to be a late adopter, but when it came to mirrorless, the advantages were too obvious. I jumped within 5 years of their arrival, which is early by my standards.
On a more philosophic note I like the DSLR and optical viewfinder because I see the real image
I regularly point out that it is wrong to think that a DSLR user is 'looking through the lens at the scene itself'. No they don't do that. Just like mirrorless EVF users, DSLR users are looking at a little screen a couple of inches from their eye. The screen is covered in little grounds, which act like pixels and emit light. That's what you are seeing.
and get to compare my photographic results with my memory of the real thing.
Yeahhh, that doesn't happen either. Visual memory is shockingly bad like that. Same goes for audio memory of course: I hope we on ASR are suffering no delusions that we can remember the audio from a live event well enough to compare it to the sound from our speakers later that day at home, in terms of the sound waves themselves. Same issues.
If I use an EVF I just see the processed image, now that may produce as good or even better image as I can see in real time the effect of my in-camera settings but I have no absolute reference.
I do! How, you may ask? Well I have these things called eyes, with which I was looking at the subject matter before I raised my camera. The whole notion that I have no absolute reference is not right.
You would actually be better off using a mirrorless camera to do what you are trying to do. You can alternate between looking at the scene with the naked eye, and raising the camera to look at the 'final image' as portrayed in the EVF. No visual memory catastrophe.
When I post process the image to match as best as possible my impressions and memory of the actual subject I'd only be trying to create a more impressive image not my best attempt at portraying the image I saw.
Same mistakes here as I noted above.
In fact, there are several important ways that the OVF view is
less realistic than the EVF view. For example lens distortion: it's not in the scene itself, it's not in the final image, but it's in the OVF. Same for lens vignetting: it's not in the scene itself, it's not in the final image, but it's in the OVF. The EVF auto-corrects for these imposed errors and gives us a better representation of what the scene itself looks like
and what the final image looks like.
Plus, in dim lighting, an OVF turns dim compared to reality and sometimes we can't even see what is going on in the scene. An EVF can brighten and provide critical information from the scene that the OVF can't.
This may or may not matter to anyone else but I like the challenge
The whole idea, that one can't do this as a mirrorless camera user, doesn't hold up.
