We love the Sony PMW-F3. It creates a beautiful image, Sony has been committed to upgrading it via firmware and it has all the bells and whistles you could ask for in a video camera these days. However, the viewfinder is a gigantic pile of crap.

I’m not going to mince words, because there’s no point. It’s lousy. It’s in a lousy place. The color is lousy. The eyecup is round, which led to someone joking it must have been invented for a cyclops to use because there’s no way to block extraneous light while using it, and lousy. I think I’ve made myself clear.

As such, we bought a Zacuto EVF, which is very good. A lovely color screen, loaded with features and the usual solid build quality that we’ve come to expect from the good folks at Zacuto. However, we had two problems:

• Using a Z-American arm simply wasn’t viable, as there was no way for a camera operator to adjust the position of the EVF on their own once the camera was on their shoulder. Also, extended camera movement worked the arm loose from its screw-in point on the cheeseplate.
• The EVF is fed the video via an HDMI cable. HDMI cables suck.

As such, we were looking for another option. In October last year, Mitch Gross and AbelCine came through for us:

ProVFM Viewfinder from AbelCine from AbelCine on Vimeo.

We ordered it immediately. Sadly, so did a lot of people, so we received it about ten days ago. We already had the Berkey cheeseplate that is required for the ProVFM Module to work so here’s what came in the box:

The build quality is superb, rock solid and looks great. It’s a piece of cake to install and, again, is rock solid once it’s on. Then we just added the HDVF20A from our old Sony HDW-730 and voilà! A robust viewfinder solution for the PMW-F3 that perfectly meets the ergonomics that people are used to for handheld work.

There is one drawback with using the ProVFM Module and that is the lack of zebras — the F3 doesn’t push zebras out of either the SDI or Video output (we’re hoping that the good folks at Sony might enable peaking and zebras on the video output in a future firmware update) and viewfinders from ENG cameras don’t generate them independently. As such, if you need to check zebras or are used to your color peaking you will have to sneak a peek at the LCD window on the side of the camera. For us, this was not a deal-breaker: your mileage may vary.

The addition of the ProVFM module and the viewfinder takes the PMW-F3 to a different level. Bluntly, Sony should be stealing licensing this idea from AbelCine going forward, it is THAT good and addresses the single largest weak point of what is otherwise a brilliant camera.

Oh, by the way, this is now the default set up for our camera. So when you rent the PMW-F3 from us the viewfinder is included at no extra charge.