Remote Display Lets You Use Camera from 500 Feet

The Pro-View wireless camera display squints its eye up to the viewfinder so you don’t have to. The two-part gizmo uses a video camera to peek into the optical viewfinder of a DSLR and beams the image up to 500 feet where it can be viewed on a 640 x 480 LCD screen, similar to the resolution on the last generation of DSLR cameras (around 3K pixels).

The transmitter comes in a variety of fits designed to work with most DSLRs from Canon, Nikon, Olympus and Sony, and you can use up to four of these with one screen/receiver unit, flipping between them or showing all four on screen at once. The transmitters will last four hours on a charge and the screen ten hours.

The idea is sound, but it could be better. There is no way to use it to trigger the camera or remote control it in any way — for that you’ll need to buy a separate (and likely expensive) remote release. It beats out the current alternative, though, which is OnOne’s software that lets you live-view remotely on an iPhone screen, but requires that the camera itself be hooked up to a computer via USB.

Soon enough, there will be a dongle that hooks into your camera and another which hooks into the iPhone, allowing this kind of control from afar, but using something you already have in your pocket. And we expect that it will cost a lot less than the $400 that Pro-View is asking for this setup.

Tags: camera, display, iphone, ipod, remote