Atomos Ninja V Accessories | Save Money With These

After spending hours hunting for the best and most affordable accessories for the Ninja V, I’ve learned you can actually save quite a bit of money by shopping smart and buying third-party gear. Here is a list of all the great but cheap third-party accessories for the Atomos Ninja V.

These are affiliate links and feel free to ask me any questions. Hopefully, this helps you save some money and time.

Atomos Ninja V Recorder – Amazon / BHphoto

I got totally set up with everything I needed for around $680 with the $200 instant savings sale on the Ninja V. Without the sale expect to spend about $880-$900. If you go with the Atomos bundles expect to spend somewhere around $1100-1200 for similar stuff.

Best Accessories For The Atomos Ninja V | For The Best Price

Since the Atomos Ninja V accessories by Atomos are significantly overpriced, I gave up on considering buying anything they make other than the actual monitors/records. The accessory kits and even the HDMI cables are just not worth it, unless you want their coiled HDMI 2.0 cable since you won’t find that rating of HDMI coiled anywhere else that I know of.

It’s tempting for simplicity’s sake to just buy their overpriced kits instead of hunting down all the accessories one-by-one like I have. But fortunately for you, your friendly neighborhood camera nerd (me) did all this work for you and has documented it here.

To really save money I usually buy the expensive stuff at BHphoto since they wave the tax if you use the Payboo card. If you don’t have the Payboo card and you buy camera stuff a lot, I highly recommend it, although it does have an insane interest rate of 30%. So if you’re the type of person that doesn’t pay off cards immediately, the Payboo card could end up costing you more money. So be careful. 

Best HDMI Cables Atomos Ninja V

Most of the negative reviews I see regarding the Atomos Ninja V look like are due to people using bad cables. Not a fault of Atomos, but a little bit of a fault of the consumer for not doing enough research and a little fault from retailers not really documenting what is needed. But to be fair, it’s complicated.

Here is what you need to know – If you shoot 4k at 60p or 10-bit, you will likely need an HDMI 2.0 cable at least. Since many of the cameras don’t do 4k60 10-bit, you can get by with cables less than HDMI 2.0.

If you don’t have an HDMI 2.0 cable you might be limited to 8-bit or 30p, or you might be limited to 10-bit 30p but definitely not 60p or 60Hz.

There are two cables Atomos sells, one that’s like $30 and on that’s around $60. You need the $60 if you want 10-bit or 60p. Their cables are nice because they are coiled. It’s very hard to find an HDMI 2.0 or 2.1 cable that is coiled.

The size of the connection is important too. The Atomos Ninja 5 uses a Type-A HDMI connector whereas your camera probably uses a mini like a Type-C or a micro. The Nikon Z6 uses a Type-C mini HDMI, so you need to find an HDMI Type-A to Type-C.

Here is what I’ve ordered. A lot of people like the coiled cables but they are hard to find. I have a coiled cable on order that I will test with my Z6 and I have another cable on order with a micro connection that I will test on my Fujifilm cameras.

I’ve ordered a few cables and so far this is what’s working on my Z6, 4k30p 10-bit F-log.

Type-A to Type C HDMI Cables

This is what I use for my Nikon Z6. I have not tested 4k60 10-bit, but it works with 4k30 10-bit.

Type-A to Type D HDMI Cables

Many Fujifilm cameras use this, my Sony A7rIII uses this. I have not tested 4k60 10-bit with this but it works with 4k30 10-bit.

Best Atomos Ninja V Batteries

There are so many great options for third party batteries out there. The last thing I was about to do was to spend way too much money on an Atomos brand battery. This is such a standard format that it just makes sense to go with RavPower or Wasabi.

Since I won’t be using the Ninja V very often outside of my studio, I just ordered some slim batteries. Each battery should be able to last about 1 hour on a full charge. With two batteries that gives you 2 hours which I figure is enough for some simple outside shooting. You can always lower the brightness of the display to get more time. But if you want to run with a bright display you might want the bigger batteries.

For third-party brands, I like Wasabi and RavPower but there are many great options out there. The RavPower batteries come with a USB charger so they will take a while but you can always search for some more expensive quick chargers if you need faster charging.

Any of the NP-Fxxx batteries will work on the Ninja V as long as they put out 7.2v. Here are some cool options for the lowest price.

Using Canon LP-E6 Batteries?

I have seen adapters where you can adapt Canon LP-E6 batteries to an NP Sony plate. I have not ordered this or tried it but if you have a million Canon LP-E6 batteries as I do, these might be useful adapters. If anyone has tried these in the past let me know. 

Ninja V SSD Drives

SSD drives are insanely cheap these days and I’m not sure why the drives listed with some of the accessory kits for the Ninja V are so expensive. You are only going to ever be doing sequential read and writes to the drive so you don’t need a crazy cache or IOPS.

I don’t think I’ll need more than a 256GB drive so that’s what I ordered. 

There are a few good options here for good 250-256GB drives. Lexar or Crucial. You shouldn’t need to spend more than about $40 really.

Remember, you don’t need cutting edge here. You’re just recording video from a mirrorless camera.

Also, Ninja V comes with one drive container that they call a Caddy. You need to mount the drive into this Caddy for it to work in the Ninja V. You can order these Caddies from Atamos in bundles here on Amazon.

If you hate having money in your pocket and want to mindlessly spend it on useless equipment, AngelBird makes MiniSSD drives specifically for the Atmos Ninja that fit perfectly into the unit. – BHphoto

Kingston is the brand I bought this time around.

USB-C Readers

You will also need an SSD drive reader. For this, you shouldn’t need to spend more than $15.

I went with a USB-C reader since that’s what my computer has, but you should be able to find these in USB-3.0 as well.

Best Ninja V Mount

Here I was definitely willing to spend the right amount of money for a good product. You kind of don’t want to skimp too much when it comes to securing your device to a camera or cage and for this I bought the SmallRig mount. 

If the Ninja V was cheaper I would go for some cheaper product but I don’t want to risk it here.

I just got the Hotshoe mount so I can mount the Ninja V to the camera, but you can also get a mount for a SmallRig Cage.

Best Cheap Accessories For The Ninja V Conclusions

Hopefully, this list gets you set up with the Ninja V at a significantly more affordable price. I’ve found ordering all the accessories like this has saved me a few hundred dollars. While I’m usually an advocate for buying the brand name stuff, Atomos is price gouging so hard here.

Stay safe and I hope you found this list helpful. Also, let me know if there is anything better I can do here.