I don’t have anything against rear LCDs except their size. If you’re holding the camera away from you at arm’s length, a three-inch screen is already pretty small and hard to read – but if you’re presenting to the camera from several feet away, you can hardly see anything.
And yet, practically all the best vlogging cameras, not to mention the best hybrid cameras, have small three-inch screens. That’s fine for stills photography, where you just need them for menus, playback and live view when they’re just inches from your face… but that’s not how people shoot video.
With video, you need to check a lot more detail – zebras, focus peaking, mic levels – and you’re often a lot further from the camera. Bigger screens on vlogging cameras are such an obvious thing, I can’t see why camera makers don’t do it – except for cost, I guess.
So if you are serious about pitching cameras to vloggers, creators and filmmakers, this does seem like one simple and obvious step that would make all the difference. Blackmagic figured this out with its Pocket Cinema cameras and their big five-inch screens years ago.
What are the objections, then? Well, a bigger screen would take up so much of the back of the camera that you’d have nowhere to put the buttons… right?
Well, what buttons do you need? Why not do everything with the touchscreen? People manage complex operations on their smartphones perfectly well, so why not cameras?
Yes, camera touchscreens can be fiddly and tricky to use… except that if they were bigger, maybe they wouldn’t be! It’s hard to see any operational obstacles. Camera makers have been using and promoting touchscreen interfaces for ages, so they’ve definitely got them figured out by now.
But, yes, redesigning the interface for full touch operation might mean new firmware development, I see that. More penny-pinching?
I must admit that I am also faintly irritated by box-shaped ‘vlogging’ cameras that are simply shrunk-down variants of existing cameras that have the EVFs removed.
I know that’s not always the case. Cameras like the Canon EOS R50 V, Fujifilm X-M5 and Sony ZV-E10 II do actually bring new video-centric features into the mix. But if camera makers are going to the trouble of designing whole new bodies (and marketing campaigns), can they not just be that little bit more adventurous with the design?
The one thing that would convince me that these vlogging cameras are serious creator tools is if camera makers gave them proper screens that are genuinely fit for purpose. Otherwise, it does feel like it’s just a cynical exercise in market segmentation.
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Of course, a solution is to pick up one of the best on-camera monitors – though again, this only underscores that the problem exists and the camera manufacturers themselves aren't doing anything about it!
