09Dec Aputure V-Screen VS-3 7 inch IPS HDMI field Monitor features

I’ve been spending a little more time with the Aputure VS-3 monitor. One of the more interesting features is it’s audio level meter display. When enabled in the menu (under “volume bar”) it gives you a visualization of the incoming audio on the hdmi port.

Unfortunately this doesn’t do you much good on the Canon 5d mark III as it’s clean hdmi out does not include audio (thanks for that one Canon). If you own a camera that outputs clean hdmi with audio you’ll end up with something that looks like this. It’s actually a nice feature to have and I wouldn’t mind seeing it adopted by other field monitor manufacturers.

The Aputure VS-3 also gives you the ability to select the incoming audio sources (HDMI or RCA). This means if you wanted to you could run the output of a field recorder directly into the L/R RCA plugs on the back of the monitor and get levels as well as headphone monitoring through the Aputure VS-3 field monitor. Or you could monitor audio from a second camera or source via the RCA input wall watching the clean hdmi signal from the 5d mark III.

Focus peaking is pretty decent on the Aputure VS-3. The monitor actually gives you the opportunity to select the color of your focus peaking indication. In this case i’m using red. It’s about as accurate as any of the other field monitors in this price range. Once your item is in focus you get a red outline around the item.

When nothing is in focus the Aputure VS-3 does a good job detecting that. In the above shot everything is out of focus and i’m not seeing much in the way of false indications. One thing i’d like to see fixed though is the menu system when you’re in focus peaking mode. When you open up the menu with focus peaking on the monitor covers everything in red because all of the items in the menu are in focus. Not sure how hard this would be to fix, but it does make navigation of the menu system a little tricky when focus peaking is enabled.

On the battery side of things I’ve been getting about an hour and half to two hours out of these Wasabi F550 batteries and pretty much all day when using a Wasabi NP-F970 battery. You can buy 4 of the F550’s for the price of one F970 and I prefer the smaller size of the F550 batteries. It’s not that much of a hassle to change them out and it keeps the weight and size of the monitor down.

So far, I’m still pretty happy with the Aputure VS-3 field monitor. I plan to take it with me on a few more shoots before I put together a full video review. I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: I received an e-mail from Aputure, looks like they’ll be updating the Aputure VS-3 field monitor firmware to fix the focus peaking issue I mentioned above. I’ll post a link once it’s shows up. Sounds like it should be a pretty easy fix.

Tags: 1024 x 600 Display, Aputure V-Screen, Aputure VS-3, Field monitor