There’s an exciting new accessory making the rounds: the Accsoon SeeMo. Not very obvious from the name, but the SeeMo is able to transform your iPhone into a monitor and recorder.
The iPhone is known for having an excellent screen, but up until now there haven’t been great solutions for proper monitoring with it.
Very few phones have the ability to accept a true video signal even. This should change that.
Caleb from DSLR Video Shooter went hands-on with the SeeMo to see just how well it works as well as show off all the new features you can try out.
There is a lot the SeeMo can do:
- Wired connection to iPhone or iPad
- Powered by NP-F (L-series) battery
- Tons of monitoring assist features
- Supports AirPods for audio monitoring
- Pinch-to-zoom function
- Can record camera’s HDMI output
- Save screenshots
- Live stream via your phone
The best part may be that you can get all this for just $179.
How It Works
The SeeMo unit has a standard clamp that will hold your phone in place. It is then powered by a Sony NP-F battery.
From there you can plug in an HDMI cable into the full-size port on the side and then use a cable from the USB-C video out to connect to an iPhone or iPad.
That’s fairly simple, you’ll just need the Accsoon See app.
Image Credit: Accsoon
Other nice features are a cold shoe on the top for mounting accessories like a mic or small light as well as a 5V USB out to charge up your phone or power another device.
The clamp can also completely detach from the device so you can attach the device elsewhere, like a cage.
In the box is a standard cold shoe mount with tilt adjustment for mounting to the top of your camera.
Demo and Features
You can see how the interface looks clean and the various overlays can be turned off for a completely blank screen except for your camera’s feed. The pinch-to-zoom function also seems to work seamlessly.
You have all the video input settings and recording information right up top and easy to see.
You can also make adjustments to things like the bitrate (up to 30 Mb/s) for more control over the quality of your footage. There are options to add or remove settings on the bottom to only feature the options you need.
You can have the following:
- Monochrome
- RGB Channels
- Histogram
- Waveform
- Peaking
- LUTs (Including user LUTs)
- Zebras
- False Color
- Audio Levels
- Aspect Ratios
- Anamorphic Desqueeze
- Grids
- Full/Video Range
- Flipping
- Image Overlay
- Save Screenshot
Many of these have settings that can be adjusted. This is an insane amount of tools for a phone.
Recording
The phone can actually record the HDMI feed from your camera in the app. It appears to only record in up to Full HD at the moment.
Looking at it side-by-side you can see the detail is not as good as the original image, but it looks great still. If you want faster turnaround time or for sharing this is a good option. It’ll save the files to your phone’s camera roll.
There is a live button and you can go live directly from your phone using the camera’s feed.
As mentioned earlier, you can monitor audio with AirPods since they are able to just connect directly to your phone.
The only downside is that there is a delay since there are multiple connections to go through. Caleb measured about 3 frames of latency at 24 fps.
Image Credit: Accsoon
Cons
While great, the SeeMo isn’t perfect. Fortunately, there are only a couple of things to address.
Build quality and design/color are the biggest sticking points. The product works, but it doesn’t feel like a premium product and the plastic doesn’t inspire confidence.
They also went with white for some reason even though I’m sure most people have blacked-out camera rigs.
Updated that would be nice to include the ability to bake in LUTs and to trigger recording on the phone via the camera through HDMI. These are possibly able to be added in firmware updates.
For many people, this may be an ideal monitoring solution that happens to be cheaper than many monitors already out there.
What do you think of the Accsoon SeeMo?
[source: DSLR Video Shooter]
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