Looking for a cheap, hot shoe mountable LCD monitor for my XL1s

MoviesByMartin

New member
Hello all, I am currently working on a short and have made the decision to not rent any equipment this go around. On my last short I rented a 7" Varizoom external monitor that I mounted to the hot shoe on my Canon XL1s. I'm looking for something similar but at a minimal cost. Anyone have any experience with this? Here are some thoughts I had:

1. If I could find a digital camera with composite video in, I could fairly easily mount that right on top and it would work nice, as long as the LCD was decently big. Unfortunately I don't think there is a cheap digital camera that has composite video input.

2. I have a portable DVD player that I use for the kids in the car, which has a slim 7" LCD widescreen monitor that would be perfect...if I could just get the dang video to display. The monitor has one 3.5 mm (1/8") A/V input. I tried running the video RCA from the XL1s into this monitor using an adapter cable and all I got was feedback. Then I said hold on, this one jack is expecting audio AND video...so I grabbed the cable from my camcorder which is a 4-pole 3.5 mm plug on one end and 3 male RCA's on the other, thinking that would get it to work...and got the same result as my first cable.

So I'm kinda stuck at this point. Option 1 would be great because I don't need the LCD to be big and it would run on its own batteries. Option 2 would be OK although I'd have to worry about how to mount it and would need to either have it plugged into an outlet or have some other alternative 12V power source.

Any help or advice will be greatly appreciated...thanks!
 
Not to answer my own question but...

Not to answer my own question but...

I gave up on using my existing DVD player monitor as after I did some research, I learned that Magnavox did not use a standard pinout for that video/audio cable, which explains why my cable wasn't working. After even more Googling, I stumbled upon portable LCD TV's, which are easily under $100. I managed to find an RjTech iView 700PTV for $56.68 shipped on sobongo.com.

This TV comes with an A/V cable to hook my camera up to, so now my next challenge is how do I mount this thing to the hot shoe :-) Anyone have any suggestions for that? Are there standard brackets that you can buy that will fit any monitor?

I'll try to post again once I've got it working...
 
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