The Hollyland Pyro H and Pyro 7 were announced back at NAB 2024 and are now available in the wild.
Let’s start right up front with this: The Pyro 7 is an incredible deal. The price of $549 seems like a typo. For that you get a wireless 4K transmitter/receiver, a 7-inch 1200 nit monitor, MP4 recording to SD, and RTMP streaming. Oh, and a clear line-of-site range of 1300ft.
Hollyland sent us review units to take for a spin and we’ve done just that. Since both systems share the same broadcast technology, we’ve focused on the Pyro 7 unit, using the Pyro H as receiver in out testing.
The Hardware
Multiple ¼” mount points will provide plenty of flexibility in mounting the unit to cameras and cages. The SD card slot is on the side of the unit, which could potentially limit access if using the adjacent ¼” mount on that side.
For portable power, the system ships with dual NP-F battery mounts on the back, although Hollyland provides both V-mount and G-mount options.
Two programmable physical function buttons appear at the top right of the unit. The buttons are easy to distinguish in the dark by feel and can be set to one of eighteen functions, including enabling video recording, toggling false color, and taking a screenshot.
To me, the power button at the top is an odd choice. A simple flick of the physical power toggle turns the unit off, corrupting any video recording in-progress on the unit. I would have preferred a digital power button requiring a 3 second hold to power down. I’m sure there was some reasoning behind the hard kill switch (perhaps to shut down broadcast of a wardrobe malfunction?), but I feel it’s a poor choice when combined with the recording functionality.
The 1200 nit display seemed to live up to its promises. I didn’t do any formal color gamut analysis, but the 3D LUTs showed no signs of banding and the shadow and highlight detail held up well.
All up, this is a robust, well put-together unit, and based on the longevity of my 400S Pro units—battle tested by performance stunt artists on a mocap stage—I expect it will hold up in production.
The Software
Usually when a company offers a budget solution all the money goes into the primary marketing points and usability suffers as a result. In other words, it looks great in the showroom, but falls down when it comes to workflow. I found this not to be the case with the Pyro 7.
For those of us who rarely work with the same gear for weeks on end, easy discoverability in the UI of production gear is essential. I had initially planned on downloading a copy of the user guide for the Pyro 7, but never found the need; no setting was more than two intuitive taps away. Case in point: I always prefer a parade scope over a single luminance waveform. A single tap on the Settings button revealed a nice big toggle between Luma and RGB scope.
From left to right, the main touch menu provides instant record, access to playback, waveform, vectorscope, histogram, focus assist, exposure zebra, 3D LUT presets, quick zoom, retical aspect marks for planning for different aspect ratios, rule of thirds crosshatching, anamorphic previewing, mirroring and inversion, and a nice quick overlay with screen grabs for easy line-up of split screen shots etc.
I had some initial minor connection difficulties with the app. After connecting to the Pyro 7’s access point, I had to quit and relaunch the app on my phone before it would register. It’s also a little annoying to have your phone disconnected from the internet in order to access the Pyro 7; I prefer systems where the device’s captive portal is used to connect it to the main external wireless network. I can understand that this opens up potential latency and bandwidth issues beyond Hollyland’s control, but it’s a much more useful option overall.
Because of the exceptional touchscreen the only real need for the app is as a second preview monitor, which in itself can be useful for various production use cases. It also makes for a reasonable use case for the Pyro 7 alone, without purchasing a Pyro receiver to connect to a final recording device or large screen preview monitor.
Hollyland has built a reputation for being an affordable provider of wireless video solutions. The modern landscape of compact, portable cameras necessitates wireless transmission of the video signal, both for live broadcast, and for relaying data back to a video village. Producing a high quality, high resolution, uninterrupted signal is a major engineering challenge in modern production environments where the air waves are shared with cellular signals, wifi signals, wireless mic signals…the list goes on.
There are several significant factors when evaluating a wireless video system: consistency and reliability, latency, range (distance) of signal, and broadcast frequency support. In our testing we had no issues with consistency and reliability. The units were deployed in a facility that had multiple Wi-Fi networks, wireless audio mics, and cellular hotspots but showed no signs of signal degradation or glitching right up to the units being placed at the very edge of their broadcast range.
Pyro includes auto frequency selection, jumping between 2.4GHz and 5 GHz bands to find the most reliable connection. Though we didn’t test it, the Hollyland transmitters are able to broadcast to up to four Hollyland receivers, in addition to the functionality that allows them to broadcast to smartphones.
While the Pyro 7 can work both as a transmitter and receiver, in our configuration we used it as the monitor-on-camera for a Blackmagic Micro 4K (which lacks any built-in monitor or viewfinder) and then transmitted from the Pyro 7 to a receiver. The range itself was much better than we were expecting. The 1,300 ft transmission range is for line-of-site connection, but we were able to transmit through two very thick concrete walls to a room about 200 ft away from the camera without signal loss.
To get an even further run into a complex of buildings, we were able to successfully gang a Pyro H transmitter and receiver together (HDMI out of the receiver into the HDMI in of the transmitter) to repeat the signal on a different channel and effectively double the range of transmission. Obviously this introduces additional latency, but this could be a perfect solution for houses of worship renting temporary spaces where setup and tear down every Sunday prevents permanent wiring.
As for latency, the Pyro series produces a 50-60ms delay in the signal. This makes it perfect for most monitoring and broadcast scenarios. You’re not going to use it to broadcast an on-stage camera feed at a rock concert to the live mixer; there are near-zero latency devices to do that for several thousand dollars more. I’ve used Hollyland for facial mocap relay for some time now, and with embedded timecode (via Deity or Tentacle) the latency is predictable and very manageable. Certainly for video village and online streaming, a 50-60 ms delay doesn’t pose a problem.
Conclusion
The Pyro 7 is an amazing deal for anyone looking for a monitor with built-in wireless transmission or reception. I would argue that at the pricepoint of $549, the Pyro 7 would be a compelling video assist device even without its wireless transmission capabilities. Add the broadcast features, and I can’t see a reason why anyone would settle for any other form of monitoring in this form factor.