Surprisingly good and afordable external HDMI EVF

[stephen]

Recently saw a second hand Sony ZV-E1 on a local online market place. Price was good and I bought it. Great video camera but lacks EVF. Same is true for it's pro oriented brother FX3.

Typically those type of cameras are used with external monitor on professional shoots or with camera LCD display only when vlogging. If you like EVFs and want to add one,  choice is not great. No external add-on EVF from Sony like the one Sigma FP has. Portkeys LEYE III modified with better loupe is the cheapest one at 450-500 E/$ but I wouldn't call it small. Then Kinefinity EVF for 1250 E/$. Great one but definitely not affordable. There is an obvious gap and need for a relatively small, high quality, affordable external EVFs for cinema / hybrid cameras.

I was looking for quite some time on AliExpress for Mini OLED displays (0.39'' to 0.7'') as a building blocks for DIY External EVF. Usually they come with controller board with HDMI input too. Almost bought some components preparing to do some 3D design and printing around them. Surprisingly found an EVF ready to be used. This type of EVFs were designed to be used with industrial instruments and were on AliExpress for quite some time. They all had lower resolution and AV video inputs in the past. For the first time saw one with 1920x1080 resolution on a 0.7'' mini OLED display and HDMI input. Also for the first time this type of EVFs is targeted toward cameras. Price was good too at 230E/$ so I decided to give it a try.

Received the EVF few days ago and am happy to report that it is better than expected. Here is the list of things that I like and few that I don't like:

What I Like:

• High resolution 1920x1080 ( equivalent to 6 220 800 dot camera EVF).  Cameras EVFs have 4:3 ratio to cover 3:2 frame + some black strips on top and bottom to display information like exposure and other camera settings. The sensor on this one has 16:9 aspect ratio. To get 3:2 ratio the EVF crops the image to 1620x1080. Still great resolution at the level of ~5 mln dots EVFs like the one in Panasonic S1 series.
• I see in the EVF exactly what I see on the LCD screen of Sony ZV-E1 minus peaking. This is a rather good thing.
• Solid, all metal outer shell, good, even great quality of craftsmanship.
• Eye cup is big, made from rubber and fits around the eye much better than traditional camera EVFs.
• Big and bright screen - has at least 10 levels of brightness that can be changed and controlled manually. Picture inside looks big and bright, quite easy to see.
• Smooth focusing / diopter correction ring.
• HDMI cable is integrated, ready to be plugged into a camera. HDMI cable looks to have good quality.
• No need of additional power or battery. It gets small amount of power (500mA) from HDMI. This is a huge plus for me.
• Has mounting thread, can easily be mounted on rigs or cages or even on camera hot shoe.
• Can be tilted  and placed in any position you want. Another huge plus. I've simply put it on monitor holder for hot shoe, which is mounted on the camera cage. EVF sits higher and is slightly tilted. It also provides 3rd point of contact and add stability. I am able to hold the camera lower and closer to the chest, which makes it more stable when shooting. 
• Optimal size for me ! Not too small and not too big. Relatively light. Another huge plus.
• Optics made of glass, look high quality.
• Great price for what it offers - 200 Euro ($) including shipping and taxes after some Aliexpress discount.
• Because EVF receives its power from HDMI you don't have to switch it on separately. It has its own ON/OFF switch but if you stop the camera, EVF stops too as it doesn't receive power from HDMI. This is very convenient because it semi integrates with the camera, you don't have to switch it on/off separately.

What could be better:

• While loupe (optics) craftsmanship is high quality, optical schema is probably not the best. Seeing tower end of the frame and in the corners is kind of difficult. In photo mode EVF has to show picture with 3:2 ratio. It crops the display at 1620x1080 to achieve this ratio. Same is true for video. This is great because this way corners of the OLED display are always cropped and dark while picture in the EVF is still high quality and resolution is still great too. So you always look at a picture which is in focus from end to end and you can see the whole of it.
• Brightness control  has many steps but goes only in one direction. Adjusting it when you want to make picture darker or go at the opposite direction is difficult. You have to cycle trough all settings value until arriving before the setting you were a moment ago.
• Brightness control button is too small and uncomfortable to use. Both are not huge issues because eye cup completely isolates your eye and cuts external light at almost 100%. Once you set the brightness level you rarely need to adjust it.
• It doesn't have the additional tools a pro external viewfinder usually has - like peaking, False color, zebras, etc.
• Because it takes power from camera and becomes additional consumer, battery is drained a little faster. Hard to say how much faster. I still prefer this compared to EVF that have their own battery.
• Picture is not as clear as in a high quality camera viewfinder. Native camera EVF receives video stream that already has noise reduced. Image on HDMI out from the camera is more like RAW video, lots of noise in the shadows at high ISO, some noise even at lower ISO. I guess the same would be with any external EVF, even expensive PRO ones. It's not EVF's fault. I also see sometimes some texture like noise, not sure because of this particular OLED display or because of the HDMI out stream. Overall picture quality is not up to what you see in a camera integrated EVF but it is close. Surprisingly noise in the shadows helps me better judge exposure and use successfully ETTR.
• I live in a PAL region but camera was set to NTSC to have 24fps. There was a lot of flicker in EVF image even when only natural (sun) light was available. Maybe this can be avoided with some additional camera settings. No such problem when camera is set to PAL and 25fps.
• Sometimes when adjusting brightness, EVF looses sync and doesn't display any image. Have to switch camera on/off one time and problem is resolved. Not a big deal but it happened once or twice.
• HDMI cable is integrated. A PRO EVF has just HDMI out socket and you can choose your own HDMI cable. This one can be easily modified IMHO.  

Size: L=~50mm; Diameter ~43mm; weight 188g with the integrated HDMI cable

Overall I like it a lot. There is nothing like it on the market and especially at this price point. I am surprised it took Chinese manufactures so long to figure out that a good market for external EVFs exists. I prefer it over modified Portkey LEYE III because of the smaller size and no need to plug and charge another battery. I may buy another one. 🙂 Now my Sony ZV-E1 has an EVF and a great one too. 🙂 

Here is the link:
On Aliexpress

You can find it on ebay too. Search for V780H EVF
Here how it sits on top of Sony ZV-E1

[BTM_Pix]

Thats a really nice find.

The lack of power requirement and small form factor makes it ideal for cameras like the S9 etc and the BM cameras like the Micro but also for the Pocket4K.

It doesn't really have to be the absolute pinnacle with all the bells and whistles as a lot of the time with something EVF less like the S9 etc as you just need it as an add on for when shooting outdoors.

I'm surprised someone hasn't been buying these, slapping their own logo on and selling them on for twice the price.

CineFran would've done exactly that if he hadn't moved on to barefaced retro console emulation scamming.

[eatstoomuchjam]

For the mounting thread, are there locating pin holes?