There were a lot of electronic viewfinders at this year's NAB, some working and some still in the prototype stage. One common trait among the different manufacturer's offerings was the price: most of them are targeting the $750 price point, give or take a few dollars. And while this may make sense for a $2-3k DSLR, what about for a $800 camera like Canon T3i? Redrock Micro's microEVF, announced at last year's NAB but yet to ship, is now aiming to cut the price of other EVFs in half. Of course, they announced the microEVF a year ago, so we'll see when it ships...
planet5D got in touch with Redrock's Brian Valente following their NAB exhibition, who relayed the following (edited):
We were the first to announce an EVF design with HDSLRs in mind. Since that time, many announcements, all seeming to add features to justify a price of $750 or even more. To us, that runs counter to the idea of HDSLRs and democratizing high production value... So we decided to go a different route and instead rethink our EVF as something closer to half that price, but maintain all the critical features – 1:1 pixel, signal pass-through, high resolution, etc. and keep the unique Redrock look of compact lightweight size. So we’ve announced that we are delaying our microEVF and going back to the designs to see how we can produce high quality for around $350-375 target.
They have not released a target shipping date, and it also seems that they don't want to acknowledge that their original claim of "greater resolution than the $3,200 RED BOMB EVF" was a simple mistake. After "going back to the designs" I expect we'll end up with a 800x480 panel -- the same as the others, and probably what it was all along. Still, if Redrock can release a decent quality EVF for $375, they'll have a hit on their hands. But as I found at NAB (again, see my roundup here), specs and price points do little to tell you how an EVF will perform. The Cineroid and Zacuto EVFs, for example, have identical resolutions -- but I found the Zacuto to look much better to the human eye. We'll see how the Redrock compares when it finally ships.
Link: planet5D
