Vincent Laforet

Last week, I was fortunate enough to receive a visit from my good friends over at Marshall Electronics.  They stopped by the studio to let me try out the brand new monitors they have been developing for greater ease of use with HDDSRL camera systems – The V-LCD56MD 5.6?, V-LCD70MD 7?, and V-LCD90MD 9? (pictured above). These monitors are going to be of great interest to HDDSLR users because of the combination of features they offer – some new and some we have seen on other Marshall products – but never before in one package.  Not to mention these are the world’s first camera-top monitors with modular inputs and outputs.

On the surface, I like the new rounded design – they feel solid in the hand and that should translate well to their reliability on set.  A variety of inputs and outputs that have been incorporated into the back of the monitor which make outputting an image from your camera to the monitor much more direct and also allows for you to pass the image through to additional external viewing devices without the use of a third party interface (such as the Blackmagic Convertor).  There are two HDMI inputs that include the passthrough feature so that you can feed your signal straight from the camera into the monitor and then back out to another monitor via an HDMI module.  This allows you to have an on camera monitor as well as an off camera monitor using the same signal and bypassing the use of the convertor.  These new monitors also have an MD slot that can be changed out for a variety of different inputs and outputs, such as SDI, HDMI, Fiber Optic, and others to be announced.  The monitors that I got the chance to check out came with an SDI input/output – which is great, as it allows you to out put the signal out to a traditional on set VTR, which also uses SDI.  Basically, these new monitors compensate for the limitations that come along with the non-standard HDMI output that HDDSLRs offer and moreover, with the incorporation of the MD slot, give you the ability to customize your outputs depending on your needs. read more...