A camera monitor (or external monitor) is a

monitor Monitor or monitor may refer to: Places * Monitor, Alberta * Monitor, Indiana, town in the United States * Monitor, Kentucky * Monitor, Oregon, unincorporated community in the United States * Monitor, Washington * Monitor, Logan County, West Vir ...

that attaches externally to a digital camera to aid with

photography Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed ...

and

cinematography Cinematography (from ancient Greek κίνημα, ''kìnema'' "movement" and γράφειν, ''gràphein'' "to write") is the art of motion picture (and more recently, electronic video camera) photography. Cinematographers use a lens to focu ...

. Camera monitors typically have larger displays than the built-in monitors on consumer cameras, and are also usually brighter and able to reproduce color better. Consumer friendly units use

HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed video data and compressed or uncompressed digital audio data from an HDMI-compliant source device, such as a display controller, ...

for connecting to the camera, while higher end camera monitors may also offer SDI connections. While some are powered by a single

battery Battery most often refers to: * Electric battery, a device that provides electrical power * Battery (crime), a crime involving unlawful physical contact Battery may also refer to: Energy source *Automotive battery, a device to provide power t ...

, others can be powered by two batteries and offer a hot swapping capability. It's not uncommon for an

AC adapter An AC adapter or AC/DC adapter is a type of external power supply, often enclosed in a case similar to an AC plug. Other common names include wall wart, power brick, wall charger, and power adapter. Adapters for battery-powered equipment may ...

to be available as well for indoor photography or filming.

Functions

In addition to providing a larger display, many camera monitors provide additional tools to assist camera operators. Such tools include framing guides, focus peaking, zebra stripes,

waveform monitor A waveform monitor is a special type of oscilloscope used in television production applications. It is typically used to measure and display the level, or voltage, of a video signal with respect to time. The level of a video signal usually corre ...

s (oftentimes as an "RGB parade"),

vectorscope A vectorscope is a special type of oscilloscope used in both audio and video applications. Whereas an oscilloscope or waveform monitor normally displays a plot of signal vs. time, a vectorscope displays an X-Y plot of two signals, which can r ...

s and

false color False color (or pseudo color) refers to a group of color rendering methods used to display images in color which were recorded in the visible or non-visible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. A false-color image is an image that depicts ...

to highlight areas of the image critical to the operator. Most typically provide the ability to apply a

LUT Lut may refer to: * Lut, a prophet mentioned in the Qur'an * Lut, Iran, a village in Amol County, Mazandaran Province * Lut (Lowlet), a village in Sari County, Mazandaran Province, Iran * Dasht-e Lut, a desert in southeastern Iran * Lut, a small t ...

to the video in real-time allowing filmmakers to view their footage with their

color grading Color grading is a post-production process common to filmmaking and video editing of altering the appearance of an image for presentation in different environments on different devices. Various attributes of an image such as contrast, color, s ...

already applied.

Recorders

Some camera monitors also offer a recording function. These recorders typically encode footage in a higher quality (using CODECs such as

Apple ProRes Apple ProRes is a high quality, "visually lossless" lossy video compression format developed by Apple Inc. for use in post-production that supports video resolution up to 8K. It is the successor of the Apple Intermediate Codec and was introduced ...

or Avid Technology's

DNxHR codec Avid DNxHR, which stands for "Digital Nonlinear Extensible High Resolution", is a lossy UHDTV post-production codec engineered for multi-generation compositing with reduced storage and bandwidth requirements. The codec was specifically developed for ...

) and to larger storage mediums than many consumer cameras provide internally. Additionally, many cameras output higher quality video (with less or no chroma subsampling and potentially a higher

color depth Color depth or colour depth (see spelling differences), also known as bit depth, is either the number of bits used to indicate the color of a single pixel, or the number of bits used for each color component of a single pixel. When referring to ...

) through their external connections than they can record internally. For example, some cameras output 10-bit color with 4:2:2 chroma subsampling through their HDMI connections, while only recording 8-bit color with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling internally. Recorder monitors are also used in conjunction with PTZ cameras to allow recording and editing on the fly. This has the twin benefit of avoiding the PTZ camera getting too hot as well as allowing editing to take place in real time with the use of LUTs etc, thus saving time and money.

References

Digital cameras Photography equipment Computer monitors {{Photo-stub