General question about T2i and an external monitor...

Rylan Zolinski

Rylan Zolinski

Well-known member
I know a lot of you use external monitors to frame shots, but how hard is it to use for moving images? I know once you start recording video, it down converts the resolution into standard definition. How difficult is it to focus in SD? I've never used an SD monitor with an HD camera and so I have no idea what it's like. I'd really like to use the monitor for more than just framing shots...
 
If you aren't trying to get a razor thin area in focus by shooting at f 1.8, than it is much better than using the built in screen. If your aperture is open too wide, it gets hard, because there is such a small area in focus, if you lose some of the detail in the monitor by going to SD, you end up doing more back and forth with the focus to make sure you are spot on. If you are using a more reasonable F-stop, though, than an SD monitor works out pretty well.
 
Yeah, I have a 480p standard def monitor that I tried using attached to the camera a couple of times, and it didnt' work for focusing indoors as well as I would have liked.

For starters, the display was widescreen, but the camera was feeding it a 4:3 ratio image with letterbox black borders on the top and bottom (weird!), and I couldn't find any way to change that. So, I had to tell the screen to stretch the image, giving big black lines vertical lines on the left and right so it wouldn't look squished when framing the shot. End result is that out of my 800x480 display, I ended up with a live preview bounding in a much smaller box surrounded by black lines. Very annoying, not much resolution left to see clearly what is in focus.

Still useful for just framing the shot and allowing the talent to monitor and make sure they appear in frame, but if you need to adjust focus on the fly its actually lower resolution than the internal display.
 
I guess I will just need to figure out if it's worth it to buy one or not. I wonder if Magic Lantern will have a firmware update for this, or if it's a complete hardware limitation?
 
the LCD on the back of the t2i is 720x480 or something like that (x3 for RGB, that's roughly 1040000 dots), what the external monitor loses is color accuracy, but not definition... as long as you can avoid the aspect ratio issues that come with canon's dumb letterboxing... (some monitors will cope with that very well, some won't)
 
NormanBates said:
the LCD on the back of the t2i is 720x480 or something like that (x3 for RGB, that's roughly 1040000 dots), what the external monitor loses is color accuracy, but not definition... as long as you can avoid the aspect ratio issues that come with canon's dumb letterboxing... (some monitors will cope with that very well, some won't)
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This is exactly what I was trying to say. That $%##! letterboxing makes using an external screen worse than using the camera's LCD. Which is just stupid and extremely pointless. I should mention this to the Magic Lantern folks at least.
 
If you check out the DP6 from SmallHD, it changes the 4:3 signal to 16:9 automatically and is an HD monitor. That being said, it is also about as much money as the camera....
 
JPM Photography said:
If you check out the DP6 from SmallHD, it changes the 4:3 signal to 16:9 automatically and is an HD monitor. That being said, it is also about as much money as the camera....
Click to expand...

It doesn't "change the 4:3 signal to 16:9 automatically", it uses the HDMI signal which is always 16:9. HD can never be in 4:3, as far as I know. For some reason, when using composite out to standard def, THAT's when it only supports 4:3.

The monitor can't change that, the camera is outputting a letterboxed image no matter what when you use that output.

I can't justify getting an HD monitor for many reasons. First of all, the human eye can't see past a certain dot pitch. That means at 5", you likely can't tell the difference between HD and SD (at least, in my testing, you couldn't see the difference unless I put on reading glasses and got REALLY close). Meanwhile, a good SD monitor is under $100. Really, I just want a larger display than the one on camera that I can mount in a more convenient position to help establish a shot.
 
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