The monitor of a 1st AC might be the most personal piece of gear next to the follow focus system. The hours of screen time spent in sun hoods have made my relationship and familiarity with my monitor second to none. The time has come to replace my trusty old TVLogic 056WP which has served me well for the past 5 years of my career and has long since been discontinued from the use-to-be most popular monitor of focus pullers worldwide.

Because of my history with my 056 and its relentless reliability no matter what was thrown at it, I was slightly biased going into my search for a replacement. The TVLogic F7H-mkii was up to batt next to the SmallHD 703.

I’ll start by noting that I own a smallHD 702 already. I’ve felt that the peaking setting on the monitor doesn’t exactly change the overall sharpness of the image to my liking, rather puts a kind of ‘frosting’ on the image. It’s ability to crank much higher than a human would normally ever use makes it somewhat useful in heavy heavy filtered or atmosphered scenarios. But my experience, as well as many others experience with their reliability really took the company in general down some points.

There are times when I really do enjoy the tools of the small hd monitor systems and it is very helpful on small shoots when I can offer overlays, screen grabs, frame lines on the fly in the simplest fashion. Outside of those tools I really don’t use anything else much.

What I enjoyed most about the 056, and for clear reasons, was it’s peaking/sharpening which tvlogic had originally named ‘aperture’. What the aperture setting did was sharpen the image particularly in the contrasting edges and I could clearly see an edge to my subjects.

The area of greatest sharpness almost gained a crispy edge. Revealing the panels lower resolution but also giving me 100% affirmation of where the sharpness lies. For this reason I was very. Much drawn to the 058.. the successor of the 056. However the fact that it was discontinued without further service, parts, and quite frankly my inability to buy new and claim on my taxes were all large drawbacks.

After finally seeing an F7-h mii on set for a brief period of time and the quality of image held, I went ahead and pulled the trigger on the F7h-mkii.

Shipping was relatively quick to my home in Toronto Ontario. Along with the monitor I also bought the full screen protector (as the plastic protector included doesn’t actually cover the screen, just the trim and buttons) as well as a hood.

First impressions were good, build quality is nice. There’s a decent weight to it at 1.76lbs. Body is metal and feels sturdy. The scroll wheel now located on the top left is a little soft and dull feeling, and the menu navigation doesn’t respond quickly while scrolling it… also for some reason menus and submenus scroll in different directions? More on that later.

The 3 hard buttons on the top right are great for assigning my typical tools and the menu button is fine. Power button is o-k. Sometimes I’m unsure if it’s received my clicks or not.

Panel is fantastic and I’m quite happy wth the image as a whole. I think as an operator or a DP I’d be pleased with the monitor and how it looks right out of the box. It’s insanely bright and the image size is perfect for onboard operating. I will note that the colour shifts as the back light is adjusted and at full brightness 3600knits it’s just trash.. But in direct sunlight, you’re fine without a hood. You can see it all which I love. I will note that on a particularly hot day exterior it didn’t take very long for the monitor to overheat and demand to be turned down in brightness.

Focus wise it took a lot of adjusting for me to get used to. It’s been about 3 months now since I purchased it and the first couple of sets were.. bad. I kept my 056 mounted next to it for the first little while. There are two settings for adjusting sharpness: sharpness and Peaking Boost. I’m still not sure exactly what either is truly doing. Although I found a combination of both seems to get me closer to my 056. Sharp:12~ and PB:3~. I change from scene to scene. The biggest thing I missed from my 056 was this ‘crispy edge’ I got out of it. I could just see it so well. After messing with many many things I found that I was able to get a match in quality! I found that if I created a custom aspect in the menu and shrunk down the image to bout a 5.5 inches.. things looked about the same. which happens to be the saddest part of pulling off of this 7incher.

*update:

After pulling on this for about 4 months now I’ve gotten more used to it’s look and don’t use this smaller screen unless I’m desperate. It definitely requires me to stand further away to get my eye to follow the focus.

One of my biggest critiques for this piece of equipment would be it’s menu and operating system. In this day and age the speed and usability is simply embarrassing. Don’t get me wrong I’m very much all for simplicity and I don’t need shiny things to make me happy. But the speed and usability is crap. Just crap.

Each individual “user button” on the face of the monitor takes AGES to load and AGES to save. I imagine their idea was to copy something similar to the SmallHD’s ‘pages’ function to keep toolsets together for different applications. But they have heavily fallen short.

Although I’m now happy enough with pulling off this monitor and it will be keeping it’s place in my peli for the foreseeable future I will say this.. For a premium monitor by a large brand like TVLogic - releasing what I would consider to be a flagship monitor - they’ve defiantly fallen short.

-TV Logic owes it’s loyal customers a firmware update.

Mike