Portkeys are releasing some new monitors with some amazing new features that we haven’t seen before especially in their highly competitive price range. The BM7IIDS is a 7” 1920x1080 2200nit on-camera monitor and the MT22DS is 21.5” 1920x1080 1000nit production monitor.
The killer feature as far as we can see is the in-built signal conversion these monitors offer. Both monitors have SDI Input/Output & HDMI Input/Output and importantly have internal conversion to all for SDI Input to HDMI Output and HDMI Input to SDI Output without the need for additional converters. This gives you an amazing amount of flexibility on set to mix and match almost any type of camera, monitor or wireless video without having to worry about whether it’s compatible with these monitors.
The monitors both also have all of the normal monitoring features you’ve come to expect from monitors in this price range including 3D LUT output, anamorphic lens correction, waveforms, zebras, peaking, Arri false colour, false colour and more.
However new to this range of monitors is a split screen monitoring option. This allows you to display two different video sources in a few orientations. Including dual horizontal, dual vertical, horizontal and vertical and even horizontal and a vertical crop of the same source. Which could be a handy feature to have when shooting with multiple cameras or trying to frame for multiple aspect ratios for content destined for social media.
The monitors also have a couple of features that are unique to the individual monitor.
The BM7IIDS has the ability to link to many cameras via wifi or camera cable to control various features such as REC, Iris, ISO, Shutter, Color Temperature, White Balance, EV, Focus Areas, and Single Focus. Note that this is not wireless video and a cable is still needed to receive the video signal from the camera. It also has support for controlling Tilta Nucleus-N/M motors via a wired connection.
The MT22DS has support for N-PF battery-supplied wireless video receivers to attach directly to the back of the monitor and receive power through the contact power plate. This is a great solution for mounting wireless video systems and powering everything off of one power source instead of needing to run additional cabling or batteries.
Overall these new monitors look like extremely interesting offerings from Portkeys and we can’t wait to get our hands on them to try them out. If you would like to register your interest or pre-order any of these products you can do so at this form or give us a call to chat about what monitoring solution might best suit your needs.