A viewfinder camera has an optical viewfinder system that is structurally independent of the taking lens and integrated into the body. When looking through the viewfinder, the photographer looks directly through a small window and not through the actual lens, as in an SLR camera.
Simple viewfinder cameras often work with a fixed focus, where everything is sharp from a certain distance. A typical feature of this system is the so-called parallax error: since the viewfinder and lens are offset from each other, the visible frame in the viewfinder deviates slightly from the actually exposed image in extreme close-ups.
