If you’re a solo content creator you’re probably overlooking this incredibly useful
tool for your work: A field monitor.
It may seem silly, why do you need that if your camera has a screen?
Let’s answer that question by checking out this $150 Eyoyo A5 monitor, right after this.
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A field monitor is a little - usually 5 to 7” - monitor that takes the signal from
your camera and lets you view it externally.
Ones like this little A5 model also give you some useful readouts that help with nailing
your camera settings: audio levels, histogram to check exposure, focus peaking or little
indicator lines to determine what’s in focus in your shot, false color to help with skin
tones - and various framing tools such as safe zones, specific framing for non-16:9.
It doesn’t have a 9:16 vertical frame mode, though - it would be cool if they could add
it, since that’s becoming more popular in 2018.
A field monitor gives you more information to compose better shots - but it’s also
just immensely helpful for nailing focus, especially for solo creators.
You can put this little monitor that’s the size and weight of a smartphone on a camera
cage, gimbal, on top of your camera with a shoe mount, or put it on a stand or line up
close to you and make sure you’re in focus.
Nothing’s worse than having a great take on-camera, putting your SD card in your PC
and seeing that you’re not really in focus.
It seems silly “oh I can just see that on the camera” but it helps a lot.
Especially if you’re using further focal length lenses where you can’t reach out
and adjust it from where you’re standing.
Even if you’re running and gunning or you’re behind the camera, a field monitor can help
just see your composition or focus better for b-roll or shots of other people.
While 5” doesn’t seem like a huge increase over 3”, there have been plenty of moments
where I’m using a really wide aperture and shallow depth of field and focus is just ever
so slightly off, despite looking fine in the on-body screen, or something’s in the frame
that shouldn’t be towards the edges - things like that.
Using a monitor even just a couple inches bigger helps you get a better grasp of what
your final scene will look like when you view it on your computer’s full screen.
This Eyoyo A5 - just love the name - is available for only 150 on Amazon, which is fairly competitive
for monitors.
As mentioned before, it’s about the size and weight of a phone, even with a battery
on it.
Supposedly it’s light enough to work well on gimbals, but I don’t have one to test
that myself.
It’s got a 5” LCD display with a velcro frame around it for the included light hood,
in case you’re working out in the sun.
It has an IPS display, meaning you’ll get decent viewing angles from it.
Now you’ll notice the product page says it’s only 1080p - but that’s the actual
display resolution.
It still accepts up to 4K signals from your camera, which means you can still shoot in
4K and use this to monitor, that’s fine.
There’s 3 quarter-twenty taps on the top, bottom, and right-hand side to provide flexible
mounting options.
On the top there’s also 5 buttons for powering on the camera and navigating the menus to
change on-screen features, turn off the obnoxious built-in speaker that plays by default, and
so on.
It’s worth noting that when you adjust settings like the brightness and contrast, that’s
adjusting how it displays the signal being fed in, not the overlays and menus, for the
most part.
Also you only need to tap the power button to turn it on and off, not hold it as I frequently
do, wondering why it’s not turning off.
Around left, you have HDMI passthrough, in case you want to daisy chain another monitor
or recorder, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a DC 12V power.
You can power this via normal DC 12V from a barrel plug, or via Sony NPF style batteries
- my favorite battery system, or Canon LP-E6 batteries, such as what my Canon 6D Mark II
and Edelkrone slider takes.
You will notice that there is a Micro USB port in the battery sled.
I got very excited thinking this could be USB powered but no, that is just for firmware
updates, sadly.
And it still draws a lot of power or something, because hooking it up to my USB hub on my
PC freaked it out and disconnected a bunch of devices until I unplugged it.
Sheesh.
It does not come with any batteries of its own, however.
It does come with a DC power adapter and HDMI cable.
On the far left side of the front of the screen, there’s a tiny little LED that’s red when
it’s powered off, if you have a battery in it or it’s plugged in, and green when
it’s powered on.
I found the focus peaking at the default sensitivity to be a little too strict for my vintage lenses
and low-light situations.
But that’s the good thing about a monitor like this, unlike the focus peaking built-in
to my camera, is you can change the sensitivity!
Get a book or something you know you can get tac-sharp focus on, then go to the menus and
change Peak Level until it shows up in a more desirable way.
You can change the color of the peaking lines, too, which is handy.
The monitor touts “wide color gamut” able to show “more than Rec 709”, which is
vague and sounds a little silly, but also isn’t something I can really test with my
current gear.
The colors seem fairly accurate and similar to my on-camera screen.
It has a slightly different color temperature than my Atomos Ninja Inferno by default, but
you can also change that in the menus.
It’s also worth noting your individual camera’s HDMI capabilities.
Entry level DSLRs like the Canon T3i and newer line frequently don’t provide clean HDMI
video without a custom firmware, meaning the overlays you see on-screen on the camera will
show on the monitor.
Some Sony cameras can only output video to 1 display at a time - be that this monitor
via HDMI, the live view screen on the camera, or the electronic viewfinder.
So if you’re connected to this, the on-camera screen will cut off.
And Panasonic G7s like what I shoot with cut off HDMI outputs if you record in-camera.
So I use it to set up my initial framing and focus and then look to the on-camera screen
just to track my shots as they happen.
Most higher-end cameras, or ones not specifically nerfed, will be fine with this.
For $150, you’re not getting a touch screen nor a native 4K resolution, and it’s not
a video recorder like my Ninja Inferno is for 10 times the price, but this little screen
has been incredibly handy around the studio and I think all solo shooters should have
one of these in their kit.
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check this out for yourself.
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I’m EposVox and happy shooting.