Poor Man's LCD View Finder

Almost all current D-SLR cameras that have a movie function need to turn off the built-in optical viewfinder when you shoot video.
This a technical limitation since the mirror must go up to uncover the sensor for video shooting.

These cameras have a great LCD that provides very good quality and viewing experience but this doesn't help too much when you want to make some movies.
Since there is usually no fast auto-focus, most of the time you need to do manual focus if you want to shoot video continuously.
This becomes almost impossible on a sunny day.

There are a lot of solutions for turning the LCD into an electrical viewfinder ranging from 50 Euro, going through 180 Euro to even 400-500 Euro.
That's a good solution for a professional, but the casual video shooter may not want to invest this amount of money for a feature that actually the camera should provide.

So, there is my simple and cheap solution to this. I got this idea when I saw a DIA film portable viewer at Fleamarket last week. I asked for a price and I negotiated it to 1 Euro ;-)

For getting this done you need such DIA viewer and two pieces of rubber band. That whoops the price to 1.01 Euro. You will need to remove the back of the DIA Viewer and follow the instructions in the following video

That's all..
Happy Manual Focusing!

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• lcdvf
• pmlcdvf
• viewfinder
• canon
• eos
• 550d
• xti
• view
• video
• function
• focus
• manual

[decoder]

i don't claim this is a professorial solution but it covers at least the safe area.

it covers more than the 4:3 since the frame is a little bit bigger than 3''

[MrzyQ]

OmG, that's awesome idea!

[shakateer]

Not bad...easy. Thanks