is there really any significant difference between watching the image slide around in the LCD screen, and watching the image slide around in a viewfinder?
Yes. It's called
control.Holding the camera right up against (literally touching) your head with both elbows tucked in makes the camera almost become part of your head. You move your head/camera as a unit, and what you see through the viewfinder is your whole world. Waving a screen around in front of your face just doesn't have the immediacy, the focus, of working through a viewfinder.
I agree completely with Mark's assessment regarding motion blur/image stabilization, but stability wasn't my real point -- I can use an unstable shooting method regardless of whether I'm looking through a viewfinder, or at an LCD screen. Why do you have to make the camera part of your head? I have no trouble at all focusing on the LCD, making it my whole world, when I compose my shot. Indeed, I can point you at a lot of medium-format cameras that use waist-level finders, which I think are a very strong analog parallel to the LCD screen. Surely no serious photographer would use such a system, if they couldn't focus? Right?
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