FOTGA A50TLS – Affordable Field Monitor

I was looking for a good quality field monitor that it didn’t cost too much, so on AliExpress I found this little nice monitor by FOTGA, the A50TLS at around $210 US Dollar.

You find the monitor on AliExpress and you can visit the official page if you are looking for firmware update and more information about the monitor (but there is not much actually on the website).

This A50TLS has a 5 inches screen, touch control, HDMI input / output, SDI input / output, and also has the possibility to use LUTs, that’s nice!

It has a brighness of 500 Nit that can become 700 Nit when using the H-Bright option, but there is no magic in it, you will find that it just rise the color temperature and set the color space to DCI-P3

There are four models, the basic A50, A50T, A50TL and A50TLS, where TLS stands for Touch control, LUTs and SDI.

I love it, yes it is my first monitor so I can’t really do any comparison with any other camera monitor out there but my first impressions are really positive, it is light, 200 g with no batteries, and has a nice, hard plastic, sunshade hood that is easy to apply and also protect the display when you put it back in your bag.

You can power the camera using the battery output connector, it has two battery slots, it uses the Sony L series battery but also with an adapter you can use the Canon LP-E6 battery, even though the low current of these batteries might not be enough to power the monitor for a long period of time.

UI & Functions

Let’s talk about UI and what functions it provides. The UI is clean, nothing fancy, it just does the work, I had some issues where the touch control didn’t work, and I found out that it is an issue with some power supplies, it seems picky about the voltage provided. The menu is intuitive, you will not find tons of options to choose from, it has all you need to start using a field monitor.

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False Color, Zebra Pattern, Focus Picking, Histogram, these are the main functions I use the most. You can zoom and pan using your fingers, if you buy the version with touch control, that I recommend.

I was able to calibrate the monitor using a color bar image that I transferred into my DSLR, than using the options on the monitor, the process was quiet easy.

The not soo good stuff

The connector it comes with the monitor is not perfect, it should be possible to rotate the monitor on two axis but one of them is too loose and with the weight of batteries the monitor rotate by itself, so I placed some soft plastic to keep the monitor in place, so no more problems! I don’t really use that kind of rotation anyway, instead you can move the monitor forward or backward with no issues.

I am not going trough every details on this article, if you are curious to know more, please watch the video I made, I go trough all the functions and options available and I also do some test outside, where I check how good is the brightness of the screen.
Is going to help me and hopefully it will help you to decide if the monitor is right for you.

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