Today, we are taking a look at the second generation of 5” Atomos monitors, the Atomos Shinobi II, announced in the second half of 2024. This new version has a sleek new design and several interesting new features, let’s take a look!
Background
For years Atomos has been making its popular Ninja line of monitor recorders and we have been using the Ninja V Ultra for quite some time. The company also has a line of more basic monitors without the recording aspect since 2019 called Shinobi.
This line includes the original Shinobi and Shinobi SDI versions as well as the larger Shinobi 7 with dual HDMI and SDI connections announced back in 2021.
In the box
In the box, you will find the monitor, a USB-C cable (just under 50cm), HDMI and USB-C lock, and a user guide.
Build and design
The unit is surprisingly thin at around 2cm (under 1”) at its deepest point and is 15cm (under 6”) long and 9cm (3.5”) in height. The viewable screen is about 5.2”-5.3” across.
On the right side, it has a recessed power button and an SD card slot for firmware updates and LUTs.
On the left,t you can find a 3.5mm jack for headphones and a remote cable connector (which we didn’t use).
There is nothing on the top of the monitor and the only 1/4 20” connection is on the bottom, luckily it has Arri locating pin holes.
On the back, there is a single NP-F battery plate with a well-made release button a single HDMI in, and a single USB-C PD that can provide 10W in for powering the unit and 13W out if you are using a battery and want to feed power to an external device like a wireless transmitter/camera.
We are really missing the HDMI out port on this monitor. On the plus side, Atomos did include a locking port so at least the cables that you can connect will not be disconnected by accident.
The Atomos Shinobi II with the Sony A7 IV
Monitor control
The Shinobi II uses the AtomOS 11 operating system (the specific version that we used at the time of testing was 11.03.00).
The entire interface is based on touch, we would have liked to see some physical shortcut buttons but this might have increased the cost of the unit.
There are three control areas on the monitor. On the top, there is a thin line that for the most part opens the top menu with settings for input, control, audio, batter,y, and info. Strangely, pressing the SDR Native in the center opens the bottom menu.
The center of the screen is all about AF and tracking, we will go back to those in a moment, but one click when the AF touch is off will show you the entire screen while another click will bring in the top and bottom menus.
This is a 16:9 monitor so the menus cover parts of the image – we would really love to see more “tall” aspect monitors where the menus are permanently displayed outside the image zone but sadly this is not very common in the industry at the moment.
The Shinobi II includes all the popular tools for monitoring, focus, and exposure including (left to right), two levels of magnification, False colors as well as ARRI False Color and EL-Zone (the last two only when log mode is enabled), multi-view ‘analysis’ view, waveform, zebras, vectorscope, focus peaking, aspect ratio overlays, anamorphic de-squeeze, and safe areas.
Note that for several of these tools, there are sub-options when you press the cogwheel on the right. It’s definitely very extensive and covers more or less anything that we would ever use.
Camera control and touch to Focus
For us the most attractive feature of the new monitor is the camera control function. Atomos is not the first to bring this option to the market, but this is the first Atomos monitor to include it and we can only hope that it will be the new standard on any of their future monitors.
We have been using the camera control feature with our A7 IV, A7R V, and A1 and it has been working without any issues. At the moment you can control most of the basics: the white balance, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, and of course start and stop the shooting. It would be nice to be able to change more settings in the future such as picture profile, audio levels, etc.
Now to one of the most useful but also somewhat controversial features of the Atomos Shinobi II, touch to focus and focus tracking.
When the monitor was first announced only a handful of cameras were supported. Since then Atomos has been working hard to add more models and at the time of publication, there are 5 Sony models supported (including the A7 IV, A7S III, ZV-E10 II, FX3 & FX30), four Canon models (EOS R6 Mark II, EOS R1, EOS R5 Mark II & EOS R7) and both the Nikon Z9 and Z8 as well as a couple of models from Fujifilm and Panasonic.
Talking to Atomos we were promised that the company is working on expanding this list. Regardless, if this feature is critical to you, we suggest waiting until your camera becomes supported before committing to buying the monitor.
In our test with the Sony A7 IV, both the touch-to-focus and touch tracking seemed to work well. The only drawback we found was that there was no tracking focus square on the tracked object like you get on the camera. This might be a Sony thing and we hope Atomos will find a way to add this in the future.
Update: we also discovered that in order to make the touch tracking work the camera needs to be in touch tracking mode and this can only be set in camera at the moment. We hope Atomos will find a way to allow the user to change the touch tracking modes from the monitor.
The Atomos Shinobi II hdmi and USB-C ports
Performance
We tested several aspects related to the monitor’s performance. The first thing was looking at the turn-on time. In our experience, it took almost 15 seconds you get an image from the camera. That is a long time to wait, quite a bit longer than our old Feelworld F5 Pro, Portkeys BM5 II, or even Atomos’ own Ninja V Ultra.
We would like to see this improve and Atomos add some sort of progress bar when you are waiting for the monitor to load.
On the plus side viewing angles seem great both vertically and horizontally and on par or in some cases quite a bit better than our other monitors.
We measured exactly 1500 lux of brightness when the monitor was maxed out. This should be enough for most shooting scenarios indoors and outdoors aside from direct summer sun. SmallRig is selling a kit with a cage, sun hood, and a screen protector which might help and we will be testing it soon, so stay tuned.
Using a quality NP-F970 battery you should expect many hours of run time even when a camera is connected. Please note that the battery indicator on the monitor didn’t seem to be very accurate in our experience, showing far less battery than indicated by the battery itself.
We have been testing the monitor in the winter, but based on our experience so far even after a few hours of usage the monitor showed only slight warmth near the battery area, and with no fans, it produced no noise, unlike our surprisingly noisy Atomos Ninja Ultra.
Conclusion
To sum things up, the Shinobi II feels like a worthy successor to the original model with a slim and light design, quality panel, that needs no fans and produces zero noise, plenty of monitoring, focus, and exposure tools, and a fairly simple touch interface with good battery life.
The most significant new features seem to be the camera control, touch focus, and subject tracking, all worked well with the latest firmware version that we used with the Sony A7 IV and can be very useful in different shooting scenarios.
The monitor does have several limitations that you should be aware of. The startup time is not great, the monitor has only HDMI in connection, and no physical buttons (aside from on/off), it also has just a single 1/4” 20 thread on the bottom and no way of powering itself via USB-C if you also want to control a camera (which requires a cable, there is no wireless camera control).
More than anything, the main complaint we heard from other users is that only a small number of cameras currently support the touch-to-focus function. We can only hope that this will be improved soon.
Pricing
As for pricing, the Atomos Shinobi II currently sells for $350.
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Iddo Genuth 
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