In addition to the Control Panel, the camera also communicates with you through the LCD monitor. In fact, the LCD monitor conveys much more information than the control panel does. The following is a typical monitor screen when the camera is in the A-REC mode. Please compare the icons with those discussed in Control Panel.
An Important Note
While the LCD monitor can convey more information, its use is power consuming. Thus, the MONITOR button, which is located in the upper-left corner of the back panel of your camera, is provided to overcome this problem. The MONITOR button is located in the upper-left corner of the back panel of your camera:
By default, when you turn on the camera, the LCD monitor displays the settings that will be discussed below. Press the MONITOR button to remove these settings. When you want to see the details of your images, this feature is very helpful. Then, press the MONITOR button again to turn off the monitor for saving battery power. When the monitor is off while the camera is on, pressing the MONITOR button again reactivates the monitor with settings displayed. Therefore, the MONITOR button serves as a 3-way switch as shown below.
Zoom Indicator
When zoom the lens using the zooming buttons, a scale appears near the top-left corner of the monitor, where W and T indicate wide-angle (38mm, 35mm equivalent) and telephoto (115mm, 35mm equivalent), respectively. The white bar shows the ratio so that you can determine approximately what focal length is being used. In the image below, the white bar stops in the middle which means the focal length is approximately 76.5 = (38+115)/2.Shots Remain and Image Quality
The following images show the "number of exposures remain" and "image quality" settings. The "shots remain" number is in the lower-right corner in a pair of brackets. This number changes after a shot is taken. Its value depends on the image quality and image size, which is shown by the settings above this number. In the right image, only the image quality setting is shown (i.e., FINE). To the left of this quality setting is the image size setting which is not shown in the image below. Please refer to Selecting Image Quality and Image Size for the details.Aperture and Shutter Speed
The aperture and shutter speed are shown in the middle of the bottom edge next to each other. Aperture is displayed in a form of F x.y and shutter speed is shown as an integer. If the shutter speed is longer than or equal to one second, it is shown in the form of x"; otherwise, an integer such as x means that the shutter speed is 1/x sec. In the following images, the aperture and shutter speed are F3.1 and 1 sec.