Monitors at NAB08 (yum)

[GlennChan]

eCinemasys DPX
1- Only monitor I saw showing real blacks across the board (bright and dark pictures).
2- Other aspects of the monitor look good (e.g. colors, viewing angle, etc.).
- Will ship in a few months (90 days I think), ~$38k price point.
This looks like the monitor to get for DI grading.

Their PRO monitor also looks good (but glow in the dark blacks) like every other non-DPX LCD.

Field Emission Technologies / FED displays (showing at 3 booths FET, Ikegami and Astro Design... following comments will be about what I saw at the FET booth)
1- Impressive blacks. They were showing this side by side with a broadcast CRT. The CRT has noticeable flaring and it's a little bit like there is a soft focus filter over the monitor.
2- They are trying to get financing to build their plant... they are initially targeting the master/broadcast monitor market first since it will take less financing.
3- Motion looks great, viewing angle excellent (of course).

They were also showing a 240hz model... that's a high speed monitor. They were showing CG footage of racing cars... it looked very very good and a certain member of the Red team didn't catch onto this right away. I had a good laugh. (But it's understandable because this CG looks very good except for the people, which you won't really look at if you're evaluating the motion.)
-The top half and the bottom half of their screen are driven separately... this causes a very subtle line between the halves. Kind of like the support wires in Trinitron monitors (which isn't really an issue).

Barco has (re)entered the arena of high-end broadcast monitors.
RHDM-2301
-Handling of interlacing: Their monitor has a strip of LEDs in the sides.
The LEDs fire from top to bottom to emulate the scanning of a CRT. They
scan fields instead of deinterlacing into full frames / 50% black lines at
once.
-"minimum 800:1 contrast ratio" (it's a trade show floor so it's hard to
evaluate this... but it sounds about right)
-Subtle flickering at 50Hz just like a CRT.
-Color looks like it matched the barco CRT beside it.

Will ship in a few months (IBC), roughly $27,500.

Sony BVM-L
-Not sure why you would buy this when you can get a eCinemasys Pro monitor (the pro has better blacks, and less than half the price). Unless you really like the way the BVM handles interlaced footage (but then you probably want the Barco).

JVC
-Will add my notes once I get home.

[Jean Déraps]

Thanks for the report Glenn. I'm looking forward to your observations on the JVC monitors.

[Greg M]

we also demo'd the eCinemasys DPX, and I was very impressed...although his demo unit had some issues as it was rushed to NAB.

Unfortunatley we didnt see the Barco...how would you compare the 2?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Eyevix had 4K displays at NAB. One was on display at the DVS booth, playing 4K footage from a DVS Cine4K box. Resolution was all there: 4096x2160, 50" panel size, needle sharp. Unfortunately, the color sucked and the contrast was worse. To say that the Eyevix 4K panel looked washed out would be an understatement. I didn't inquire about pricing... No good way to drive it outside of large scale cinema players right now and they would have to fix the contrast and color issues for me to even consider, at any price.

The eCinemasys looked nice.

FET... To me was similar tech and less impressive than the Canon / Fujitsu SED displays shown at CES. Doesn't matter anyway... Until they can actually manufacture and ship a product, it's just a nice idea.

[GlennChan]

although his demo unit had some issues as it was rushed to NAB.
Thanks for the bringing that up as I should have mentioned that. It had some clear issues as Martin mentioned that moisture got into the panel's optics, creating some obvious splotches on the monitor. Anyone interested in buying a monitor should get a demo / check that their monitor is fine (might as well put up full screens of r, g, b, white to check uniformity; the moisture problem depends on temperature). If you do that it shouldn't be an issue.


Unfortunatley we didnt see the Barco...how would you compare the 2?
I saw the Barco on the show floor, which is not good for evaluating things like black level (e.g. surround brightness can hide black level, and adding a ND filter helps monitors on the show floor, and picture content makes a difference). But the blacks look a little glow in the dark like every other panel around.

- They had it close to a Barco CRT... I couldn't tell the colors apart. (Though the blacks probably wouldn't match on dark scenes, and they didn't show color charts which makes it easier to see color differences.) It's probably close enough that you can treat it as essentially the same.

- It's a trade show so there were other elements of the monitors that I didn't look at. e.g. if the field order is reversed, is it easy to spot that? Is there banding on gradients, how do SD images look, etc.

- Viewing angle on both are good, but will slightly crap out when looking at it almost sideways. In practice it shouldn't be an issue because there's little use in looking at an image that slim.


FET... To me was similar tech and less impressive than the Canon / Fujitsu SED displays shown at CES. Doesn't matter anyway... Until they can actually manufacture and ship a product, it's just a nice idea.
They claimed no patent issues, though that might be optimistic??

Bottom line... I'd really like to see them produce consumer displays.

[Kevin Lang]

Did anyone see the monitor in Ikegami's booth? It was a flat panel CRT! It looked fantastic was not able to get real specs on it due to the fact the guy had very broken english, but what I did get is it is not due out till 2010!

[Greg M]

Did anyone see the Astro 4k display...wow!

[Kevin Lang]

Did anyone see the Astro 4k display...wow!

Did you see the price tag wow!

[GlennChan]

It looked fantastic was not able to get real specs on it due to the fact the guy had very broken english, but what I did get is it is not due out till 2010!
That was one of the FET prototypes.

[GlennChan]

JVC DT-V24L1D
1920x1080 pixels
1000:1 contrast ratio (looks about right, though I've not verified myself; nice looking blacks)
Color washes out slightly with viewing angle
B&H shows $3.5k price tag. This looks good for a basic broadcast monitor.

Matrox MXO
-Deinterlacing looks good.
-no HD-SDI in
(I don't really have a good opinion about this, but the lack of HD-SDI in means it's not that good if you want to monitor off a VTR. And if you need to deal with a VTR, you really want to monitor off its SDI output.)

Panasonic broadcast LCDs
-Their booth had a Sony LCD monitor beside it. They were showing that their display handles motion better. Motion looks a bit better but it has that flicker on large areas of brightness.
-Not at least 1920x1080 resolution. IMO, any panel like this is not worth bothering with as the scaling will introduce additional artifacts on top of not doing 1920x1080.

Panasonic plasmas
-They make some really giant plasmas. Impressive size.
-To my eyes, there is a subtle weird yellow "plasma rainbow" if I flick my eyes back/forth and on motion. This effect is much worse with some consumer Pioneer plasma display I was looking at elsewhere at NAB.
-Not designed for critical monitoring per se.
Anyways, interesting because they are big.

There were other vendors/products at NAB like Cinetal, Blackmagic HDLink, TVLogic, eCinemasys' entry-level FX display, Astro Design. I don't really have an opinion of them right now (which doesn't mean that I dislike those products). Astro had an interesting 4K display though (too bad about some of their source footage... could probably use some Red).

*Disclaimer: What I saw on a trade show floor may not be indicative of shipping product. Lighting conditions, how the monitor was setup, the material they used can distort how good the monitor looks.
Please get demo units and evaluate monitors for yourself. And do things like throw hard material at the monitor (e.g. gradients of different colors, both vertically and horizontally; zone plate; reversed field order footage... is that easy to spot? etc. etc.).

[Ken Willinger]

I thought the TV Logic monitors were very nice. I'm thinking about picking up one of the 17" and selling my Panasonic 17". The TV Logic has HDMI in (can monitor our menus) as well as a Vectroscope and Waveform built in. About $3500.

[Greg M]

Astro had an interesting 4K display though (too bad about some of their source footage... could probably use some Red).



Not sure what you saw, but while I was there the Astro was displaying Ultra HD footage which was spectacular...Red footage couldnt compare.

[GlennChan]

Dead pixels. Lots and lots of them.

2- In any case sometimes it just comes down to taste. I was at the FCP supermeet and was really impressed by one of the music videos (the one with the guy and the mannequin in the mirror and the really pimp art direction- anyone knows what it's called?).

[Nils J. Nesse]

So is the JVC DT-V24L1D still the only choice for less than $5000?

[GlennChan]

I think the eCinemasys FX monitors are also less than $5,000. I'd also consider them and strongly try to demo that and the JVC.

Panasonic - less than 1920x1080 pixels.

Sony - Their LMD-2450W is $5,295 list if you want HD-SDI. Street price might be less.

Boland - not designed for standard colorimetry. They uh... let the primaries land where they land (too saturated).

Astro, TVLogic - not sure what their pricing is.

Teranex Clearvue, iKan, Marshall - didn't look at them.

Ikegami - can't remember the model # I saw. Some color shift on viewing angle, blacks slightly purple. Might be worth evaluating (I did not look at this monitor very carefully or closely).
B&H shows some models less than $5k.


*I didn't take very good notes on these monitors (e.g. whether they have waveform vectorscope, whether those tools look at every line, HDCP, etc.).

[Jim Hoffman]

someone at the Red booth was saying what a great option the ecinemasys monitors were for color correcting. A nice under 10,000 solution.

[Tai Wah Lim]

I thought the TV Logic monitors were very nice. I'm thinking about picking up one of the 17" and selling my Panasonic 17". The TV Logic has HDMI in (can monitor our menus) as well as a Vectroscope and Waveform built in. About $3500.

Getken, from their brochure, it seems only their 40" has HDMI. Which model of the TV Logic for 17" has HDMI?

[Ken Willinger]

Which model of the TV Logic for 17" has HDMI?
When I was at their booth they explained that the 17" multi format monitor had HDMI as well as HD-SDI, component etc. and included a waveform and vectroscope. Here's a link to their site:
http://www.dandesmet.com/index/TVLogic

[Michele Gavazzeni]

So is the JVC DT-V24L1D still the only choice for less than $5000?

I have one and i've spent so much time searching for my monitor i can say the JVC is the monitor to buy in the $5000 price range and beyond

I haven't seen the Barco, and the DPX
but compared to the more expensive DCM eCinema it cant take the challenge and also give richer blacks.

it doesn't have like the Barco an integrated color calibration device so you have to use its knobs to calibrate it.

[Andrew McCarrick]

Did you see the price tag wow!

They're priced at 100k right?

[Greg M]

I was told $80k

[Andrew McCarrick]

I was told $80k

okay, wow... saves me 20k per monitor then.... I was expecting 100k. So I'm saving 400k. This NAB has dropped the budget on my feature by almost 2.5-3 million dollars.