I am interested in the Manhattan 8.9" LCD monitor and was wondering if anyone else has used it and can comment on it. It looks like it uses decent components, though the housing and buttons look to be somewhat cheaper construction. Does it do well for focusing with the 7D? Would it be any better than the Lilliput monitor?
Manhattan 8.9" LCD
- Thread starter wildfly
- Start date
hdimages.ca
Well-known member
i have the 720 manhattan . love it. can be mounted top or bottom. I had bought the proto type about a year ago . fan noise was a issue. i have sent it back for the software upgrade and now the fan is not needed. great picture / lousy plastic sun cover ( broke before i even put it on. ) good on power. i had the ikan hd before it but night and day difference. i am using it on the 5d .
Justin Bissett
Active member
I've had it for about 6 months and i'm not a fan. It's a pretty bulky monitor, and with the battery added on it gets kind of heavy. I've got it o the front of my rig now and it really adds a lot of weight to the front so I need to get some kind of weights for the back to counter balance. It weighs about 4 pounds with the battery, so its not a ton, but its about a pound heavier that the 7d plus a lens.
The picture quality on it is pretty bad. I don't know enough about monitors but it seems like the pixels are made up in circles with each series surrounded by another circle. It hard to explain, but the picture always looks bad. It may be something i'm doing, but i've tried calibrating it and it hasn't gotten better so I don't know.
The monitor is good for focusing though which is all I really care about. It just isn't a good reference for what your picture will look like.
My other problem with the monitor is that it broke down on me right before I had to shoot one of my final projects. I had probably only used the monitor for maybe 6 hours and then it just stopped turning on and smelled like it was burning on the inside. My whole shoot was ruined because we needed it for someone to pull focus wireless while I had the steadicam on. With the monitor broken my friend had to crouch behind me and pull focus based on the steadicam monitor. In the end we had a bunch of shots out of focus which i'm not real happy about.
I contacted customer service and they fixed the monitor within in a week so I have to give them credit for that.
The other problem with the monitor in conjunction with the 7d is that the hdmi output displays the image 4x3 and then the image is cropped on the top and bottom just like on the cameras display. This results in your 9 inch monitor displaying like a 6 inch image. This isn't the fault of the monitor, and there may be some way to fix it in the camera. I haven't really looked into that.
Anyway, not a great monitor, but good for focusing. There's a picture of it on my rig in this thread if you want to check it out. http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=194323
The picture quality on it is pretty bad. I don't know enough about monitors but it seems like the pixels are made up in circles with each series surrounded by another circle. It hard to explain, but the picture always looks bad. It may be something i'm doing, but i've tried calibrating it and it hasn't gotten better so I don't know.
The monitor is good for focusing though which is all I really care about. It just isn't a good reference for what your picture will look like.
My other problem with the monitor is that it broke down on me right before I had to shoot one of my final projects. I had probably only used the monitor for maybe 6 hours and then it just stopped turning on and smelled like it was burning on the inside. My whole shoot was ruined because we needed it for someone to pull focus wireless while I had the steadicam on. With the monitor broken my friend had to crouch behind me and pull focus based on the steadicam monitor. In the end we had a bunch of shots out of focus which i'm not real happy about.
I contacted customer service and they fixed the monitor within in a week so I have to give them credit for that.
The other problem with the monitor in conjunction with the 7d is that the hdmi output displays the image 4x3 and then the image is cropped on the top and bottom just like on the cameras display. This results in your 9 inch monitor displaying like a 6 inch image. This isn't the fault of the monitor, and there may be some way to fix it in the camera. I haven't really looked into that.
Anyway, not a great monitor, but good for focusing. There's a picture of it on my rig in this thread if you want to check it out. http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=194323