Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsBest-value bright external monitor for filmmakers
Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2019
I was an early adopter of the first Shogun when it came out, which was also my first external monitor for shooting video. At the time, recording capability in the same unit was really important, because cameras couldn't deliver. Today, cameras record internally at decent codecs, so it's all about the monitor - and even there, the one big flaw of the Shogun was its brightness, measured in "nits." That's where the Bestview R7 comes in: it's more than DOUBLE the brightness of the old Shogun, and on par with the brightness of the newest Atomos monitors.
The R7 has all the "advanced" features that are, by now, the bare minimum we want in a monitor. Among them is the ability to apply your camera's LUT onto its flattened log footage, that otherwise would make it difficult to judge exposure, etc. Many monitors even today lack this feature, though you need to be careful about double-applying a LUT if your camera has its own LUT viewing features ("Gamma Assist" on Sony Alpha, for example).
Atomos had boasted of its menu system, and while it's still one of the best, Bestview has done a surprisingly good job at making the touchscreen interface fairly intuitive. It's a smart decision to make the buttons and menu items mostly textual, instead of having to memorize icons (and learn what they each do).
When it comes to the physical enclosure, I actually like that it's plastic, to keep the weight down. It's durable enough. I also like that there is an HDMI output - other monitors skimp on that. The included cold shoe mount is OK, and I actually like that it's limited to 180-degree rotation, so that it stays level with the back plane of the camera. But I'll definitely be adding an extension arm that I already have, for maximum flexibility - and I wish that the R7 had more 1/4"-20 mounting holes, on all sides. Similarly, there's no place to mount a sun shade.
I didn't find the Hotkeys to be as usual as they could be, limited to a few shortcuts that I'm least likely to use. But there is a USB port for firmware updates, and seeing how Bestview has already delivered a firmware update so soon after launch, it looks like they'll be listening to customers and improving the product over time.
Now that I'm shooting in at least 4K resolution all the time, with razor-thin depth of field, nailing focus is more important than ever. before It's just not possible on those tiny little screens built into cameras. So, this product is a small investment to make, if it saves your priceless footage from simple mistakes that are normally hard to see.
