Most certainly not a solution.

OK, so I was feeling a tad spendy the other day.

And, yes, I have complained loudly and often of the awful LCD screen on Canon’s 5D. ‘Useless outdoors’ about summarizes it.

No problemo. I look up the splendid B&H catalog, you know, the one printed on rain forests or whatever, and I come across this Delkin gadget which claims to fix the crappy brightness of the Canon 5D’s LCD in anything resembling daylight.

Twenty-five bones and four days later, there was Marty, our UPS man, with the package. The Delkin Pop-Up shade ….

It’s actually very nicely made. A thin sheet of glass protects your LCD screen (off with that plastic film protector!) and the whole thing replaces Canon’s eyepiece with its (identical) eyepiece, plus the shade thing and a couple of pass-through buttons for printing and deletion. Here I am peeling off the plastic sheet protection for the glass plate.

Off with the Canon eyepiece and on with the gadget. It fits perfectly, meshing nicely with the base of the Manfrotto QR plate. The fit is very secure and the increased depth of the camera in no way interferes with the useability of the viewfinder.

Here it is after prying open with a figernail.

Does it work? Does it make the screen remotely legible in sunlight?

Well, here’s my subjective rating on a scale of 1 to 10, the latter being today’s state-of-the-art.

iPhone 10
5D + Delkin 5
5D naked 0 (meaning unuseable)

Ergonomics? The only complaints I have are that the On/Off lever is harder to get at (no big deal as you can leave the 5D ‘On’ for ever without significant battery drain) as you can see below, and that you have to angle the camera away from you a bit when trying to read the display in sunlight, otherwise all you will see will be your own nose.

Worth $25? Barely.