Gear News and Reviews

If you’re a Canon 5D MkII shooter and enjoy the video capabilities of this body, then you’ll enjoy video even more with the LCDVF.  One very dedicated member of the Cinema5D forum, spent several months of his time designing the LCDVF.  After so much hype and speculation, it was a pleasure to check the mail one day and see the LCDVF just waiting to be used.

Not long after opening the box it was time to mount it onto the body.  Tonis (LCDVF creator) implemented the creative system of using micro-magnets to attach the view finder to the metal base.

Currently the system sells for very respectable $169 at lcdvf.com.

Below you’ll find the LCDVF mounted to a Canon 5D MkII body.

The LCDVF mounted to the metalic base plate

Mounted to the body, you can also see the clip for the included lanyard.

As seen from the left side. Note that the LCDVF can also be mounted for viewing with the left eye.

Canon 135mm f/2L, Canon 5D MkII body, LCDVF

And finally, looking through the LCDVF at one of the custom menu screen on the 5D.

Nobody likes to see something like this, but it’s like a car crash; you can’t help but stare. A friend brought this to me and let me take a look at this 5 month old lens and body. As you can see the lens is a complete loss, but surprisingly the body is in perfect working order after the fall. I guess it could have been worse. At least the body is salvageable.

That is what's left of an EF-S 18-200 IS.

I can only assume that there wouldn't be this much damage if this were an "L" lens and had fallen from the same height.

This is what's left of the mount.

Body damage was surprisingly minimal considering the amount of lens damage.  The body sustained a crack in the frame between the tripod mount and the rear LCD.

Body damage to the Canon 50D.

Why have unboxing events become popular on tech sites?  I’m not exactly sure, but I will take a guess.  All of us like to get something new, we like the process of shopping endless review sites and finding the best deal whether it be online or at a traditional brick and mortar store.

When you get home maybe you clear off the table and slowly unpack your new purchase savoring the new smell and the freshness of virgin, untouched tech.  OK, maybe I went too far.  Regardless of your reason for reading/watching unboxing videos or photos, here is yet another one to enjoy.  It must be some kind of vicarious experience peaking over the shoulder of someone opening a new toy.

From Estonia with Love

Efficiently packed with a little surprise? Thanks Tonis!

From left to right: mounting plate, LCDVF, lanyard, lens cloth and viewfinder eyecushion in the background

A full review and additional photos will follow.

You can draw your own conclusions of these two system by looking at them side-by-side.  They are roughly the same size, however the basic design approach looks quite different.  The LCDVF has a smooth, more organic look whereas Zacuto’s Z-Finder V2 has a more industrial look.  The LCDVF actually has more in common with the first generation Z-Finder than the V2.

The first thing noticed in this view is the red adjustment ring on the Zacuto.  The height of the LCDVF also appears somewhat exaggerated in this view.

Slightly elevated view.  You can start to see the heart of each system, the optics.

The business end of these two viewfinders.

Shortly, I’ll have two viewfinders for review, Zacuto’s Z-Finder V2 and the LCDVF.

With the addition of HD video capture on several Canon and Nikon bodies, companies large and small have been scrambling to come up with a solution to the manual focusing issues of these V-DSLRs. Manual focusing isn’t too difficult through the viewfinder when shooting stills, but it can be a challenge with shooting video, since only the rear LCD is available for review.

With a limited number of pixels on a relatively small screen it can be hard to attain critically sharp focus especially when using fast lenses with wide open apertures. Stay tuned for the shoot out.

Arguably so. The Canon 85mm f/1.2L Mk II is the most recent version of this nearly holy lens. When photographers are given a choice this has to be on everyone’s short list for portrait or low-light photography. Not that Canon’s other 85mm lens (85mm f/1.8) isn’t good. In fact some may prefer the f/1.8 because of its faster focus speed and it is about 1/6 of the price.

The portrait lens of choice.

Back to the lens in question. The lens will set you back a few $$$$, but the results can’t be matched with any other Canon lens. I used this for a number of portrait shoots, and it’s never failed to please clients. Even to the untrained eye there is a special quality about the images shot with the 85L. The bokeh is unbeatable and the sharpness even wide open is impressive (Although I have to say Canon’s 135mm f/2L is sharper wide open, but that’s another story).

Can't get enough of all that glass.

Besides shooting portraits, the lens naturally excels at low-light photography. Wide open @ f/1.2 and the ISO set to 800 you can walk around any downtown street and shoot with only ambient lighting. It’s almost surreal the amount of light the lens captures. If you want to use it during the day wide open, be sure to throw on a good neutral density filter in front of it. Otherwise you’ll be shooting with some outrageous shutter speeds. My body is maxed out at only 1/4000th which is easy to hit on a sunny day.

A look at the rear.

Are there any drawbacks? Sure, there are a few. Mentioned earlier, it is relatively slow at acquiring focus. Yes, the price is steep, but keep in mind the demand on the used market keeps this lens’ resale value high. The speech I always give my wife is that, “I can always sell it for almost what I paid for it.” At just over 2lbs it’s heavy too. Finally, there is some vignetting at f/1.2. Vignetting is the least of my concerns though since it’s automatically corrected on some of Canon’s newer bodies or easily corrected through just about all editing software.

This image was taken at f/1.2 as an example of the shallow DOF you'll be playing with.

I’m not sure if this is a drawback. When you’re shooting at f/1.2, and why wouldn’t you since you got this lens over the f/1.8 version, the DOF is extremely thin. At times it’s almost too thin. If you’re shooting a portrait at f/1.2 you will often have one eye in focus and the other eye out of focus if the subject’s eyes aren’t exactly on the plane of focus. Most likely you bought this lens for the razor thin DOF, but it can bite you if you’re not careful.

Color reproduction, contrast and sharpness are outstanding.

Beautiful bokeh in every image.

GNAR Rating: 5-Stars

*As a side note I wanted to add that I’m not one to sit around in my basement and shoot resolution charts all day.  I have fallen victim to that in the past and it quickly lost its novelty.  My preferred method of assessing if a lens is performing as it should is to actually use it.  I realize that there is a whole community of people that enjoy shooting test charts and analyzing the data with 100% and 200% crops.  If you are looking for a lens review that has countless MTF charts, graphs, numbers,data there are plenty of sites to choose from.  I just won’t be providing any here.  I hope you understand.

The Shared Library

Many of you have households with more than one computer.  One of them is most likely your ‘main’ machine that manages all of you media files such as music, movies, TV shows, etc.  In our house my wife has her laptop, I have my laptop and we have an iMac in our office that serves as our ‘main’ computer.  This is the machine that downloads our iTunes subscriptions, music and movies.

However, everyone knows that it’s much more comfortable to watch your movies and TV shows on the couch or in your favorite La-Z Boy instead of sitting at your desk.  Previously, we had to copy the media files we wanted to watch/listen to to a thumb-drive and then transfer them to one of our laptops.  I was looking for a more sensible way of doing this without third party software.  I liked the way iTunes categorized my files and I was already familiar with the iTunes interface so when I found out that Home Sharing was available as part of the iTunes 9 upgrade I gave it a try.  Perfect, seamless, exactly what I was looking for.

To turn on shared libraries, find the Advanced menu.

To activate Home Sharing, start iTunes and find the Advanced menu.  Scroll down to Turn On Home Sharing, at this point you’ll be prompted for a password.  Enter your password and on the left-hand side of your iTunes window you’ll see Shared.  Under Shared you’ll see a list of your authorized libraries.

Choose your music, movie or TV show, wait for a few seconds for it to buffer and you’re set.  Enjoy!

GNAR Rating: 5-Stars

If you’re like me you’ve probably download WAY too many applications for your iPhone.  I’ve downloaded some application simply because they were free and I might need them at some point. All of this has left me with a total of 99 apps to manage, most of which I don’t ever use.

Once they’ve all been downloaded and installed I spend more and more time trying to find an application among the 5 or 6 different screens. Before the iTunes 9 release I would try and manually manage my app placement by physically dragging the apps around from screen to screen. An unnecessarily tedious operation. Thankfully, iTunes 9 has an app manager that helps you organize iPhone screens.

iTunes 9 applications screen is a tremendous help for keeping your apps organized on your iPhone.

Once your iPhone is plugged in, click on your phone in the left-hand column and select the Applications tab. Once there, you’ll see a virtual screen that mimics what is currently installed on your iPhone. You may organize your apps by: Name, Category or Date. After you’ve listed your apps in the desired format simply drag your application over to the virtual iPhone screens displayed to the right.

That small addition to iTunes 9 has made a world of difference for keep all these apps organized.  Thank you iTunes.

GNAR Rating: 5-Stars