At IBC 2024 in Amsterdam, Kinefinitywas showing a prototype of its upcoming Eagle HDMI e-Viewfinder.
This is based on the Eagle SDI e-Viewfinder I recently reviewed on the site. While that is a great EVF it only has an SDI input and wasn’t suitable for use with a lot of smaller cameras.
The Eagle HDMI e-Viewfinder looks to be a great option for anyone using smaller-sized cameras that only feature HDMI outputs.
There have been very few decent and affordable (of course this is subjective) third-party EVFs on the market.
Kinefinity set out to change this, and their Eagle SDI and HDMI e-Viewfinders offer a lot of features and functionality in a compact form factor.
The Eagle HDMI e-Viewfinder is powered via a USB-C input and although the prototype only had a single HDMI input, Kinefinity is looking at putting in an HDMI loop-through in the production version that will ship.
There have been options in the past from companies such as PortKeys, and Zacuto, but not many others. There are of course a few proprietary EVFs made by companies such as ARRI, Sony, RED, Kinefinity, and Canon, but those options are generally pretty expensive.
I think we haven’t seen many options come to market because a lot of younger shooters don’t use EVFs (scratches head).
Zacuto’s Gratical and Gratical Eye EVFs were arguably the most popular options for many years. The original Gratical was very large and it wasn’t until 2018 that the smaller and more compact Gratical Eye was announced. The Gratical Eye did away with the battery plate and this allowed Zacuto to make it considerably smaller than its predecessor.
In 2019, Zacuto followed up with the Kameleon Micro-OLED EVF.
A few years ago I told Kinefinity that they should make a universal EVF based on their KineEVF OLED Viewfinder, and it seems that they listened.
The new viewfinders are somewhat based on their existing KineEVF OLED Viewfinder, which uses a single proprietary cable to send both power and the image from the camera to the EVF.
1920 x 1080 Micro OLED panel
The EVF utilizes a 0.7″ / 1.3cm 1920 x 1080 Micro OLED panel with a contrast of 10,000:1.
The panel supports 8-bit depth and 16 million colors. However, internal processing is conducted at 10-bit depth.
Each EAGLE HDMI e-Viewfinder is claimed to be precisely color-calibrated in production. Under normal circumstances, further calibration is not necessary. If needed, factory calibration is available.
Price & Availability
The Kinefinity Eagle HDMI e-Viewfinder is still in the prototype stage, but Kinefinity is hoping to have it available to purchase at the end of the year.
