dual use HD monitor
 

I'm confused by the alphabet soup of I/O for monitoring.

I plan on buying an EX-3 and a laptop edit setup. I want a 8" field monitor for the camera that can double as a monitor for the edit system.

Can I take a feed directly out of the laptop into the monitor for viewing the footage in HD?

Suggestions on which connections would work for this? Component HD Analog? The camera has a Mini D out.

I've been doing some research on this lately. It seems that on the newer laptops they are adding HDMI to the output options. If the monitor has HDMI then all you have to do is set up the graphics card to output to the second monitor. This assumes that your edit software will send the program monitor out through the graphics card. I'm using CS3 and can do this with my dual DVI desktop card easily. The other options on some of the laptops are VGA and/or s-video. On my card, the s-video doubles as a component out as well with a simple adapter. This allows me to connect a HD monitor with component only inputs. My advice is to do research on the laptops video out options before buying. Also, the performance may be an issue. It seems on the laptops, the graphics memory is shared with the system. This could have an effect on the playback performance within your edit application.

DVI to SDI
 

Brian

You mentioned you have dual DVI. I'm looking at a Lenovo Thinkpad with dual DVI. What did you feed? A monitor with DVI input? Convert to something else?

I now have to start searching for DVI to SDI conversion. I think I'm heading towards a monitor with HD-SDI input which works great with the EX-3.

Currently I'm using the s-video output to feed my SD monitor. My graphics card downconverts the HDV timeline from Premiere and sends it out. When I eventually upgrade to a HD monitor, I can use my second DVI port to it.

Which monitor are you looking at? Does it only have SDI as the digital input? Can it accept DVI or HDMI?