Electronic viewfinder (EVF)

(This is the English language version of this posting: EVF)
What is this all about? Many old video camera (VHS era) are equipped with tiny black and white CRT screens as viewfinders. It is exactly these this posting is about. Many of them can be hooked up to a BAS or FBAS (Yellow RCA connector). Such as CCTV cameras or a Raspberry Pi to be used as a tiny screen or with the magnifying viewfinder assembly you can put it close to your eye and have a much larger image.

O_sucher_view_detail2

In most cases one doesn’t know the pin out of the EVF. Fortunately it’s relativity easy to find out since most (or at last the ones I encountered) of the EVF use one of the following ICs as controller. In this case you just have to identify the controller, look up the VCC, GND and Video-In pins and trance them over the PCB to the input connector or wiring. Attention: In most cases the Video signal is passed over a capacitor for DC decoupling.
using the example of an old Grundig camera there were just three wires meaning once I traced GND and VCC In the third was the Video In.
Other EVF sometimes have additional LEDs to show the camera is recording or used separate GND wires for VCC an the video signal or such. So pay attention.

ICs

There are many different ICs but the all have something in common:
Video In, VCC and GND.
Here is a list of the ones I found

AN2510S

Mid_AN2510S

  • Name: AN2510S
  • Labled: 2510S
  • Pin Video in: 18
  • Pin VCC: 2, 12
  • Pin GND: 4, 8
  • Supply voltage: 4.8V DC
  • Datasheet: AN2510S.pdf

AN2512S

Mid_AN2512S

  • Name: AN2512S
  • Labled: AN2512S
  • Pin Video in: 9
  • Pin VCC: 2, 10
  • Pin GND: 4, 8
  • Supply voltage: 4.5 – 5.3V DC
  • Datasheet: AN2512S.pdf

AN2514S

Mid_AN2514S

 

  • Name: AN2514S
  • Labled: 2514S
  • Pin Video in: 11
  • Pin VCC: 2, 12
  • Pin GND: 4, 10
  • Supply voltage: 4.5 – 5.3V DC
  • Datasheet: AN2514S.pdf

AN2515S

AN2516S

BA7149F

BA7125L

Mid_BA7125L

 

 

3 thoughts on “Electronic viewfinder (EVF)”

  1. so cool!! thanks for posting all this. im really curious about one of these that might support color (hoping to use as standalone demodulator)…i love learning about crts :)

  2. I want to use a detachable olympus evf as a video monocular. Is there a way of connecting it to any hdmi input? I would like to view what’s on my phone screen on it or feed it video or images from a raspberry pi.

    Thanks for your advice,

    1. можешь . но нужен конвертер hdmi – av . но малинка и так имеет композитный видеовыход

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