Portkeys LH5P III Introduced – 5.7-Inch 2200-Nit Touchscreen, 10-Bit Panel, One-to-Many Camera Control

by Nino LeitnerToday

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Portkeys brought the LH5P III to IBC 2026, the third generation of its HDMI camera control monitor, now with a 5.7in touchscreen at an unusual 2160 x 1080 resolution, 2200 nits of brightness, a 10-bit panel, 4K60 HDMI in and out, and a $399 price tag. I stopped by the Portkeys booth to talk to Jeff Loch about the new panel, the redesigned MOVNORM OS, the Log Stops exposure tool, and a one-to-many control mode that lets one monitor drive up to four other cameras on set.

Full disclosure before we go any further: you might know Jeff not from Portkeys but from CineD, because he edits our show videos, including the ones you are watching from IBC this week. When he takes a break from cutting our footage, he does marketing for Portkeys, which is why he was standing on the other side of the counter for this one. So treat the facts below as coming from the company, not from us. I did use the first LH5P for a while and liked it, and we have covered the brand for years, from our review of the original LH5P to the BM5 III WR with RED Komodo control. Camera control has always been the thread running through the lineup, and that is still the story here.

A wider panel with room for the status bar

The LH5P III is slightly larger than the LH5P II it replaces. The display grows to 5.7in, and the resolution moves from the 1920 x 1080 you would normally find in this class to 2160 x 1080. The extra width has a purpose: the monitor shows the full 16:9 image without scaling it down and still keeps a strip on the left or right of the picture for the status bar and its function buttons. Since the whole front is a touchscreen now, that strip is where most of the operation happens, and the image stays clean.

Brightness is 2200 nits, so we are in daylight-viewable territory without a hood. According to Jeff, it is a true 10-bit hardware panel and not an 8-bit panel with 2-bit FRC dithering, which would be a real step up at this price if the panel delivers on the claim (we have not measured it, so file that under manufacturer talk for now).

Every unit is Calman calibrated before it leaves the factory. In the box you get a card with a QR code; scan it with the Portkeys app and it pulls up the calibration report for that specific serial number, not a generic one. Jeff quoted a Delta E below 1.1 in Rec. 709 and below 2 in DCI-P3 for the booth unit, with full coverage of both color spaces. I like the per-unit report a lot more than a “factory calibrated” sticker, and I would love to see this become standard on every monitor under $500.

Build, buttons, and ports

The housing is aluminum throughout, like the rest of the LH5P family, and it is clearly built to get knocked around. What struck me first is the new shape: the top and bottom edges are very thin, and the display sits slightly recessed in the frame, so it looks like a phone sitting on a plate rather than a single slab.

Along the top edge are four user-assignable function buttons, the power switch, a physical lock for the touchscreen (a small thing, but anyone who has had a monitor change settings while rubbing against a rig knows why it matters), and a menu button. There is a 1/4in-20 mounting point on the right side and another on the bottom with locating pins. Connectivity is HDMI only, one input and one loop-through output, both rated to 4K60. Next to them sit a USB-C PD port for powering the monitor from a power bank or a V-mount battery, a USB-A port for loading custom LUTs and firmware, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

That headphone jack is more useful than it sounds if your camera has no audio output of its own. The monitor plays back whatever audio arrives over HDMI, so what you hear is what the camera is sending down the cable, which in most cases is the same signal it is recording. No guarantee, as I said to Jeff on camera, but a lot better than nothing. On the back is a built-in Sony NP-F battery plate and a small antenna for the wireless control link.

One cable for video and control

Portkeys ships the LH5P III with a new combined cable. On the monitor end it is a single HDMI connector; on the camera end it splits into a full-size HDMI plug and a USB-C plug, so video and camera control travel down one lead instead of two. Less cable spaghetti on a small rig is always welcome. Jeff said the cable was first introduced with an earlier model and works with other Portkeys monitors, so it is not proprietary to this unit.

Camera control, wired and wireless

Camera control is the whole point of the LH5P family, and when I asked which cameras it supports, Jeff’s honest answer was that the list is too long to recite. On the Sony side, he said nearly every current model is covered, including the FX3, FX30, and FX6 as well as the a7S III and a1. Canon Cinema EOS bodies such as the C80, the Nikon Z8, and Blackmagic Design cameras are on the list too; the full breakdown is on the Portkeys website.

What “control” means depends on the camera. On most bodies you get shutter, aperture, ISO, and record start and stop. On Sony cameras it goes further, with touch focus and touch focus tracking: tap a subject on the monitor and the camera’s autofocus follows. Jeff called it a native extension of the camera, and from what I saw on the booth, that is a fair description.

The wireless link is for control only, not video. It runs over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth depending on the camera: Blackmagic Design bodies connect over Bluetooth, a Sony FX3 over Wi-Fi. Wired control goes through the combined cable described above.

One monitor, four other cameras

The feature that stood out most in our conversation is what Portkeys calls one-to-many control. Designate an LH5P III as the master, and it can connect wirelessly to up to four other Portkeys monitors on the same set, each attached to a different camera, over a range Jeff put at 50m (164ft). From the master you can then change settings on all four remote cameras. To be clear, it is control, not monitoring: you do not see the other cameras’ images on the master, but you can adjust them without walking over. For a small multi-cam interview or event setup with matching Portkeys monitors, that is a lot of convenience for the money.

MOVNORM OS and the Log Stops tool

The LH5P III runs MOVNORM OS, the operating system Portkeys has been rolling out across its HDMI monitors, and the interface has been rebuilt for this generation. I remember the first LH5P’s menus being comprehensive but not exactly pretty, so a redesign was overdue. The tool set covers what you would expect at this point: focus peaking, false color, a luma waveform, and a luma histogram, plus 3D LUT loading via the USB-A port.

The one that is specific to Portkeys is Log Stops. Feed the monitor a log signal and it identifies which log profile it is looking at (you can set it manually in two taps if auto detection misses), then divides the frame into 13 exposure zones and reads them out in stops rather than IRE. So the display tells you a highlight is two stops over or a shadow area is one stop under, which is the language a DP actually thinks in when deciding whether to add a light. It is not exclusive to the LH5P III; Portkeys is adding it to more of its range, and I think it is a smarter way to judge exposure on a small screen than squinting at a waveform.

The Sony DP5 came up

I had just come from Sony’s booth, where the DP7 and DP5 control monitors were being shown, so the comparison was hard to avoid. The DP5 is also HDMI only and wired, with native touch focus for Sony’s Cinema Line, at a price above €2,000. My question to Sony had been why it costs that much, and the answer was native control and touch focus. Standing at the Portkeys booth, Jeff’s answer was that the LH5P III does nearly the same functions for roughly a tenth of the money, and that the two are in different leagues. As the manufacturer’s own product, the DP5 will always have first claim on full compatibility. Whether that justifies a $2,000 gap is something I would think about very hard before buying.

Price and availability

The Portkeys LH5P III retails for $399. Jeff said shipping is “real soon” without giving a date, and pointed to the Portkeys website for the current status. The company has not yet published a dedicated product page for the LH5P III, though firmware for the model is already listed in its download section. For more information, please visit the Portkeys website.

Would a $399 touchscreen with wireless control keep you from spending more on a camera-brand monitor? Let me know what you think in the comments below!