 Alright guys, if you've been looking for a way to connect your mirrorless or DSLR cameras to your phone as a monitor, then this is something you will need. This is the brand new Aksun SEMO, it's an HDMI to USB monitoring adapter. This is made specifically for iPhone and iPads. If you do have an Android phone, unfortunately you won't be able to use this with that just yet. Let's go ahead and unbox this and set this up, but this is a very quick and easy way to use your iPhone as an external monitor for your digital cameras. In my video, I'm going to be using my Sony A7C and I'm going to be replacing this screen that comes on the camera itself, which isn't too great, especially when I'm filming outdoors and I'll be using it with my iPhone 14 Pro Max, which has a very good large screen and a much better brightness level than the ones on the cameras themselves. So let's start off by unboxing this. You've got yourself a user manual with very clear information of how to get this up and running, but it is very straightforward. Essentially, you have this type of cold shoe mount, which will sit on top of your camera. There's a few buttons on ports I'm going to showcase on how to use this in a second. You have your cold shoe adapter there. You have a little Allen key that you can use to just tighten and angle the position of this cold shoe adapter. Then you have a USB-C to lightning cable to connect your iPhone. And finally, you have a USB-C to USB-C cable for those iPad versions that do have a USB-C port. You cannot use this for Android phones because you need to connect this to the iOS app, which is called the Aksun C app, which you'll find on the iOS App Store. OK, now, although these are the only accessories that you do get in the box, these things alone will not be able to power your phone as a monitor from your camera. You're going to need two additional things. One, you'll need to source your own HDMI to micro HDMI cable or whichever port your digital camera has to connect to an external monitor. So I'll be using this micro HDMI cable and then to power the Aksun device itself. This requires NPF batteries that you can purchase anywhere online. And I have a pack of two RAVPOWER NPF batteries, which I'll also use to power on this device. So you'll need those two additional accessories to source yourself. And I'll leave a link in the description of where you can buy these two accessories yourself for your cameras. So let's go ahead and set this up and showcase to you guys how it works, how it looks and how the app performs by using the Aksun C app. Let's take a quick look at the Aksun C mode. You've got a button just in the middle there for the phone clamp. When you expand this out, it locks into place to unlock it. You press this and it will come back down on the left hand side. You have the HDMI in and then the five volt out. The five volt out is to power the device. If you wanted to use a USB-C power port to actually charge this up if you don't have any MPF batteries. And on the right hand side, this is where you'll put the USB-C port for the cable for your phone or your iPad. So that's the video output there. Then you also have the on off button to actually turn this device on. I'm going to use an MPF battery because when I film outdoors, it's so much more convenient to have a wireless power source rather than trying to find a plug outlet. Clip it into place like that. I'm going to use my HDMI cable, put that into there. And then let me just connect the quarter inch thread there at the bottom to the cold shoe mount. There we go. We've tightened it. You can unlock this, put it on your camera. Once you twist it, this will lock it into place like so. Connect the HDMI cable into your camera and then I will connect my phone to the mount. In fact, there's also an additional cold shoe mount at the top of the Axon device. So if you wanted to maybe put a microphone or a studio light or something like that on there, then you also have the option. And then the last step is to connect the USB-C end to video out just on the other side. And then connect the lightning port to your phone. And that's it. Quick and easy. The only thing I now have to do is turn on my camera and then I'll turn on the Axon device by pressing the on off button just to the side. And then I will launch the Axon C app. OK, so I've just connected a slightly longer HDMI cable because I want to maybe trial using this at a further distance than the camera. But nonetheless, everything is now connected. I've opened up the app. The first thing you need to do is hit the monitor button there. And you'll see it automatically loads everything that you see on your camera. So I think that's very quick and convenient. There's some apps that will allow you to connect to specific camera models that you don't need to have a cable for. But one of the key problems with that outside of the app itself is latency. This one, because it is connected directly with the cable HDMI in the Axon CMO, you get minimal to no latency at all because it will be exactly like having an external monitor. So let's just quickly test the latency. So I've got my lens here. I'm going to quickly zoom in and you can see on both screens. It is pretty much exactly instantaneous and it matches like for like. This is one of the key things where I would use this so often because I would like to see everything that happens in real time rather than seeing any type of leg. For example, I wave my hands and it doesn't matter how quick you do it. The quality on it will be exactly matched to what you see on your screen. And one of the other benefits to this as well is the screen quality of your phone will keep improving year on year. So if you do buy the latest iPhones, for example, you will always have better brightness, better screen display, better refresh rates and all of those kind of things which make it so much better than the actual screens, which are tiny, small and never change on your mirrorless cameras. Now, let's have a quick talk through of the functionalities of the app itself. Along the top, you have key information about your recording setup. One thing to note is this does max out the video input at 1080p at 60 frames per second. So if you wanted to have the input at 4K, then unfortunately that won't be able to occur in this version of the app. But that may change in a future update. It has H264 video codec for encoding. Then you also have a 48K 16 bit audio input just there on the right with AAC encoding on the audio. Then you have a whole bunch of different options along the bottom there that you can see, and I'll open them up to showcase all of the different capabilities of this app as well. So the first option there you can see is a toggle between black and white and color. In fact, if you hit the settings button just on the right hand side here, this will bring up all of the different options that you see along the bottom. Now with the RGB one, if I do turn that on, it's on red. We can actually switch between green and blue as well to add that hue. If you go into histogram, I'll turn RGB off. There's a whole bunch of additional options to show you the histogram as well. If you want to switch between Luna, the size, the position and the opacity as well. And then if you go into waveform, you can also do a very similar thing by changing all of the different options here for waveforms. If you want to see any focus peaking, then you can also adjust that there. You can set it to red. I'll actually turn this on. You can do green, blue, white. For me, personally, I like the red ones, and it just allows me to see, you know, where the focus on the camera lens is actually peaking and at what max level. You can adjust the levels as well in case you wanted to maybe focus on something a little bit more closer or further away. If you go into look, you'll be able to select a external LUT file that you can attach from your phone. So there's an option there to select a LUT file, and this is a very quick and easy way for those people that do add LUTs to their filming. You can see a live view of what it would look whilst you're actually recording it rather than doing that in post production. So I think that's a very convenient form to do that. And it also supports AUT files in addition to CDL files. If we go into zebra, you can also focus on the zebra markings just there in the distance and see where the exposure levels are currently focused on. If you go into audio, you can also position the audio to be left and right and then set the volume. If you go into markers, you can set specific markers within the frame of your video and then change the ratio of them, the aspect ratio. So, for example, mine is on two thirty five one. If I do maybe 15 to nine, 14 to nine, four by three, you can see in the background is adjusting the frame of the video or you can just leave it back on your camera's default. And if you swipe, if you now go into distort, this can actually de-squeeze the frame. So if you maybe use an anamorphic lens, then de-squeezing would be quite convenient for that purpose. I'll just leave mine back onto the original. You can also display grids. If you go to the display option, you can also have a limited range, full range. You can set the color ranges. You can set safe markers and ratio markers. And then you can also have an overlay. So you can also select a picture as well to overlay and showcase an opacity. And this could be useful in some scenarios for whatever filming you're trying to do. And finally, if you back out of that and you like what you're seeing, that last button there is to take a screenshot. You press that and the screenshot will be saved to your gallery. So that's all of the different things that the Accune C app can do. And I think that's, you know, quite advanced compared to some of the other apps that I've seen in the past that try to do similar things in a wireless capacity. And then finally, the record button on the app. This will actually record the video directly onto your phone. And then you'll have it saved in your phone's gallery instead of having it saved to the SD card in your camera. If you record using the record button on the camera, that will record it directly to the SD card that you've got onto the camera's memory rather than on your phone gallery. So these are kind of like two independent recording methods as well, which is something that any other external monitor that you buy from Amazon that cannot do anything like this. So that is a very quick and convenient way to set everything up. That's an introduction to the app. And here's some scenarios of how this becomes very useful. OK, so you guys can see the setup now when I'm recording directly from my Sony A7C, the actual screen on the Sony turns black. If I do have a monitor connected to it. So in this case, my iPhone 14 Pro Max is doing a really great job for me to really clearly see how I look in the shot, how the focus is something I won't be able to see if I was trying to just use the actual Sony screen itself, especially from a slight distance. So for me, you know, the quality I think is absolutely great. And if I am going to be filming outdoors, this is going to make a massive difference because when I turn the brightness up on my phone, it just makes things 10 times clearer than anything that I can get from either the Sony screen itself or even some of the smaller, compact monitors that I bought off of Amazon in the past. And personally, for me, any of you guys that are content creators that do filming on the regular and you do it, especially in remote locations, this is a must have gadget, especially if you have an iPhone or an iPad to take external monitors with you in your camera bag or accessories bag. I think it's just a bit more of an overhead that you can avoid by just having your phone with you at all times and using that as a monitor as and when you need to. So for me personally, I think that's really great. Not only do you need to just use an iPhone with it, this can also work with an iPad. So let's go ahead and set this up with my iPad and see how this looks on a much larger screen. Of course, you won't be able to mount this on the Axon C mode device itself. So you'll have to have it separately, maybe mounted just next to you on the side. But just to showcase a variety of the different options that you get with this device, let's take a look at that. OK, so this is why I wanted to have a slightly longer HDMI cable connected because I've now connected this camera to my iPad Pro. You can see the cable. I've got it all the way along the side connected to the Axon C mode device. And they connected that by the USB C cable this time to my iPad Pro. And I do get a live view. And again, it's a very quick and responsive view of your videos. And personally, for me, this is a really great way to get a live view of your filming so you get a better perspective to see if everything you're filming is actually in frame, if the colors are right, if the focus is accurate and all of those types of things. One of the other key features about the Axon C app is live streaming. So if you are a streamer and you wanted to see yourself much clearly when you are live streaming to your audience, you can see next to the shutter button, you have a live button. If you select this, you get a pop up. What you can do is you can enter your stream code, URL and paste it into there, whether you're using it for YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, any other live streaming app, just enter the URL code, hit go live. And then you can go live directly from the app itself, which I think is a very quick and convenient way to go live in with a much higher quality camera, such as your DSLR or mirrorless camera. So I have the camera set up outside now. The camera itself is off. I've got the Axon C app on. But as you can see, nothing is being shown if I turn the camera on. It just takes a few seconds to load the live view into the app. And there we go. Having the iPhone 14 Pro Max with the brightness level up makes it so much easier and clearer to see myself than on this tiny little screen, which you can see is still pretty dark. So at a distance, it's going to be so much easier when I do filming outdoors. I can just tap anywhere on the screen to go into full screen view, get rid of those options. And then from here, I can now start filming by seeing myself so much more clearly. And one of the most common use cases for you guys to actually get this product is when you do filming in remote locations, when you are outdoors. This is the perfect complementary thing to have with you, because it just allows you to see yourself, especially when you're filming on your own outdoors, to see if everything is in frame, if you've got the best shot. Because the last thing you want to do is to film yourself, not clearly see that you wasn't in focus all that time. And then you have to do a reshoot. For me personally, when I am filming this outdoors, as you can see here, I find it so much clearer and easier to see if I've got the perfect shot the first time around. And it saves me a lot of time and effort. And in my own opinion, for anyone that does own an iPhone and also owns a camera that does filming quite often, this is the missing piece of the puzzle for you to have the perfect camera set up. You literally just set this up within less than a minute and then you have an iPhone as a monitor. And then you can actually use this as your go to camera rig for most of your remote filming. So that's it, guys. Hopefully that review was very useful for you guys. If you do like this, then do check out the link in the description. This was just released. I recommend if you are using an iPhone and you do a lot of filming and you create content, this is a must have in my opinion. So let me know if you guys have any other questions. Make sure to like this video. I've got new videos out every week with cool gadgets, much like this one. So make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of those ones. And I will catch you guys at the next video. Take care.