Videofinder

Instantly turn your phone into a digital viewfinder for your Mercury film camera!

The Mercury Videofinder is a tiny, cold-shoe-mountable video camera that plugs into a mobile phone to display your image. Designed for the Mercury Stereo Hood Finder system, it can mount on any Mercury Stereo hood (for minimum vertical paralax) or on any cold shoe.

The Videofinder is powered by your phone and thus requires no batteries.

It comes with a simple, universal phone mount that mounts to either the top cold shoe rack or the left side cold shoe of your Mercury camera. Switch it to either position, on the fly, depending on whether you prefer to use your camera at waist level or directly in front of you.  You can also leave your phone unmounted from the camera in order to use it as a handheld, portable monitor in any position--especially helpful if your camera is placed in a difficult position, such as on the ground facing upward, against a wall, etc.

In order to use the Videofinder, you will need a third-party app called USB Camera Pro ($5). At this time, the Videofinder is only guaranteed to work on Android devices with OTA capability, running USB Camera Pro. We are investigating iPhone options.

This can be used with your standard phone, or--what we recommend--you can purchase a dedicated Android phone ($30 on Ebay) for your photography use.

This comes with printable framing templates that will be emailed to you. They cover several common phone sizes, but you can also resize the PDF to fit any phone.  Use the template to note and mark frame borders for the lens or lenses you use.  For 6x6 and MF3D use, the finder is particularly useful to wide angle lenses (55mm to 65mm).  80mm and longer work fine as well, but require some form of mask to mark the four sides of the frame, as the video feed will be larger than the frame size.

For longer lenses, we recommend our Brilliant Finder, which is a nice compliment to the Videofinder and mounts identically to the Stereo Hood system.