Depending on your eyesight a good viewfinder can be very useful.
Trying to compose a scene by looking at a small screen too close to focus on isn't easy.
I agree, but it does depend on your eyesight. If you're short-sighted, like me - that is, you can read a book close up, nut need glasses for distance, then may find you prefer the LCD.
Thanks to Eric for explaining my earlier post, it must be my scottish accent coming through, nobody understands a word I say these days
I'm not sure I'd agree with Eric about optical viewfinders being more accurate though. I'd argue that the LCD will exactly replicate the exact image, not a pixel more, and not a pixel less, than has been captured by the camera's electronic detector. An optical viewfinder will only be an approximation to that, and because the viewfinder lens is to one side of the camera lens, the optical viewfinder always sees a slightly shifted image. An SLR viewfinder, of course, overcomes these deficencies, but SLRs (see below) are A LOT more expensive.
If you were a photographer 20 years sgo, you may already know about SLR (Single Lens Reflex). These facilitated an accurate viewfinder by using a single camera lens to generate the image for the negative film, and also on a frosted glass screen that you looked at, via a little glass prism, through the viewfinder. When you looked thorugh the viewfinder, you saw the image on the glass screen then, when you took your photo, a little mirror flipped up inside the camera so the image was focused on the film, rather than the viewfinder. So what you saw in the viewfinder was exactly what you got on the negative.
Now, if compact digital cameras with LCDs don't suffer from the problem (viewfinder distortion) that SLRs fixed, then I've never really understood the point of digital SLRs... or at least that's my excuse for not being able to afford one