How could you add a viewfinder to a ZV-E10-2 Sony and other similar Sonys which lack viewfinders and only have a screen?

9:38From Paul Wallace in Austin, Texas. How could you add a viewfinder to a ZVE-10.2 Sony and other similar Sonys which lack viewfinders and only have a screen? And he's got a link there to a DP review article about vlogging. Right back to you, Bill. What do you think? So, yeah. Companies make these. I wouldn't go with just trying to rig something up.

10:07There are companies that make these things. In fact, let me show you one. A lot of people talk about the Zacuto. That's what it looks like. You can see that it's a standard iCup-style direct monitor that clamps on to the back of your camera over the screen. And it gives you a much better acuity, much better view of that because it's the lens in there that lets you see the pixels up closer.

10:32That one's, I think, $150, $200, something like that, if I remember right. It's been a long time. Hoodman makes a less expensive one called the Hoodman Loop that does the same basic functions. And there are units like this that strap to the back of your camera all the way up to beyond $1,000. I don't remember who it was that made them, but I remember seeing a very expensive version,

10:55the kind of thing you would expect to see Apple using when they're shooting their keynotes on an iPhone that has extraordinary optics and the rest of that. So there are solutions for finding something to put on there, Paul, that allows you to use it more like a regular eye cup loop rather than the screen on the back of the camera. It's hard to tell size by looking at an image, Bill.

11:17That thing looks as big as that Sony camera. It looks massive. You know, because of the optics involved and because of the way things work, and they want to pull it off the camera towards your eye so your nose doesn't run into the back of the camera, the same thing. So all of those things, you can see, let me pull it back up again.

11:35It's got a little focus wheel in there, so it's got some optics in there, and it's got some support. It's set up for standard, I can't remember how many millimeter the rods are that most of these rigs use nowadays, but it's got mounting points, and most of them are in the same kind of form factor, some sort of a pull away from the back plane of that screen and put some optics in there

11:59so that you can actually see pixels more clearly. and more importantly probably if you're in bright sunlight it's going to put your eye into a closed system where you can truly see that without splash from a sun behind your shoulder or something like that make it hard to see corny what do you think well i mean there's two different types of viewfinders there's like the thing that bill was talking about where you have your eyes a magnifier

12:24in front of a little LCD screen. Or you can go with a high brightness monitor that you mount. This is a Viltrox, which are reasonably priced and has its own battery on the back for power. It has HDMI input and throughput on the bottom there. So you patch your HDMI output if your camera has it in through a cable in and then take it out to a feed elsewhere.

12:50These are 1200 nits, so they can be viewed in sunlight. One reason you might want a viewfinder is if you want to see your image in bright sunlight. These with the lensshade, the lensshade is built in here, which is really cool. You can just fold it down. It also forms a protection for the screen when it's in its storage case. These are pretty nice because they have built-in scopes in them and everything.

13:14So that you can put your, you know, if your camera's outputting its menu system, it's also a touchscreen. so that if it's outputting a menu system, you can use this big touchscreen to make changes in it, which you can't do with a viewfinder. It also has a button. If you can't use the touchscreen, let's say you're in cold weather and you don't want to take your glove off to use the touchscreen,

13:34you can use the little scroll wheel and the active little click button on the side. And it's 1,200 nits, has a hot shoe adapter, has a quarter inch, quarter 20, so you can put it on an arm so you can face it in any direction in a hot shoe adapter or cold shoe adapter actually just to mount on top of the viewfinder of the camera if it has a shoe on the top of it so that's another way