PortKeys BM5 – A Field Monitor That Can Control Your Camera

Adam Kuźniar · March 15, 2019

I can't think of any other third party screen that can be used to directly control your camera with! This seems to be a killer monitor, especially for the price!

Here's the full press release - https://***URL not allowed***/portkeys-bm5/

Mako Sports · March 16, 2019

Looks like a monster " the PortKeys BM5 is entirely made out of aluminum. In front of the screen, there is a toughened glass in to protect it against shocks. The BM5 is daylight viewable with an impressive brightness of 2000 nits and a viewing angle of 178°."

Seems like a proper 502 Bright/503 Ultra bright competitor. With dual HDMI and SDI - $400 seems wayyyyyyyy to good to be true. Might be selling the 701L for this guy.

I love Smallhd's UI but i'm not willing to spend $2,100 just for that. This is the product ive been waiting for.

Mako Sports · April 10, 2020

I pulled the trigger on the BM5 and decided i'll do a little review on it.

PROS

Very bright with a solid build quality. Colors are accurate and I love being able to load and store luts in the monitor. SDI + HDMI are also a bonus. Monitor comes with a few cables like a dtap and camera control. You will need to supply your own mounting hardware and batteries.

The False color is solid, no crazy latency issues either. The monitor is VERY sharp, so sharp you might need to dial it down. Depending on what your shooting you might not even need peaking as the perceived detail is enough to pull focus from.

I really enjoy the fact that you can do monochrome viewing + color peaking. Makes manual focus very easy.

Use NPF/Sony L batteries = cheap and very abundant.

CONS

There are some things that irk me about the monitor. For instance you have toggle through every view mode when using the waveform. (I only want to use the view mode when it takes up a smaller portion in the corner of the screen.)

With the focus peaking it will put the color edges around your camera screen icons which is annoying. I don't remember either of my SmallHDs doing that.

The Zebra setting has numerical values that make no sense, its not the typical 0 - 109 IRE.

The fan when set to high is pretty loud but that's to be expected with a 5 inch monitor that's 2200 nits! I leave mine set to medium speed usually.

The UI as a whole sucks compared to SmallHD's, its slower and not as intuitive. This is by far the biggest pitfall of the monitor and what keeps it from be a 5 star product.

I use it with my FS5 and A7iii. Its a fantastic monitor for outdoor viewing with the 2200 Nits. I shoot sports outdoors and a lot times under the mid day sun and I haven't had any viewing issues with it. With the FS5 I use batteries with a dtap port so I don't have to use extra NPF batteries on the back of the unit.

CONCLUSION

Overall a very good value for $500, a good alternative if you want something more rugged than an Atomos Shinobi/Smallhd FOCUS but think the SmallHD 502B/503 ultrabright are to expensive.