Monitor’s Guide

"Sony has addressed the CRT-performance gap head-on with its newest LCD-based broadcast monitor, the BVM L230. Featuring an LED backlight system for an improved color gamut, as well as a 120-Hz scan rate with black frame insertion for reduced smearing, the L230 surprised many of the attendees at the April NAB convention in Las Vegas. Almost no one expected an LCD monitor to have this kind of image quality.

"We had a room set up where you couldn’t see the monitors’ bezels or logos," says Garry Mandle, senior product manager for Sony’s Display Products Group. "We took our best 24-inch CRT monitor, and we placed it up against two of the L230s. It was completely black, so there was optimal viewing. Then we asked anyone who came by to tell us which were which. On average, only about one in ten was able to tell."

While I wasn’t able to take the comparison test, I did see the L230 on display at the booth. It was truly impressive. There’s one hitch, however. Shipping in October, it’s expected to sell for about $25,000. For high-end projects and post-production houses that can afford it, the L230 would be a viable and space-saving option for color-critical and motion-critical work.

Why choose an LED backlight rather than a traditional CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent) backlight ? According to Mandle, with a standard CCFL solution, you start with 8 bits of color and have to take away bits if you want to adjust the monitor’s white balance. That’s why most LCD monitors don’t have a white balance control. "With LED, we can adjust the RGB value of the backlight because we have 12 bits driving it. You have about 4,000 steps in each color where you can do your adjustment."

The 120-Hz scanning rate in Sony’s BVM L230 provides the time needed to insert a black frame between every video frame. The result is a cleaner image with less distortion. "Basically we erase the panel when we load a black frame," says Mandle. "So any information from the previous frame is gone before we load a new frame of information. There’s no residual information, and there’s no smear."

With traditional LCD monitors, objects moving diagonally across the screen often exhibit a jerky, stuttering effect. The monitor has to guess where the object will be next. And with faster movements, it often guesses wrong. To counter that problem, the L230 incorporates a new processor designed for this particular LCD panel. "The processor has a wide enough bit path and is fast enough to complete its decisions in time," explains Mandel.

The L230 has a native 1920 x 1080 resolution, though it can accept a 2K (2048 x 1080) signal. "Since you’ll have 64 extra pixels of content on either side, there’s a control you can rock in order to see those areas," says Mandle. It has video inputs for both 10-bit and 12-bit color.

Other LCD monitors that can handle high-resolution video include Astrodesign’s DM-3400. The 56-inch monitor supports an impressive 3840 by 2160 pixels at a 60-Hz scan rate. That resolution (sometimes referred to as Quad HDTV mode) works out to a 16:9 aspect ratio. It will set you back a hefty $60,000.

Cine-tal’s Cinemage line of monitors ($9,950 to $35,000) offers advanced color control right down to the individual pixel. The 1920 x 1200 resolution 24-inch LCD display supports 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 video, RGB and YCbCr data values, and 8-bit and 10-bit color. An OmniTek Dual-Link Waveform Monitor and Vectorscope is integrated into the display. A Cinemage monitor targets such tasks as screen matching, color pre-visualization, multi-camera set-ups and image quality control.

Color calibration doesn’t have to be an expensive add-on for a monitor. Pantone’s hueyPRO ($129) includes an ambient light sensor to deliver a consistent reading under most lighting conditions.

The company’s Eye-One Display 2 ($249) is designed to calibrate color over a mix of displays, including CRT, desktop LCD and laptop LCD.

Datacolor’s Spyder2PRO ($249) includes calibration profiles for front projectors, as well as CRT and LCD displays. The Spyder2PRO’s Ambient Precise Light profile settings are optimized for a broad range of studio lighting environments.

If you need real-time color calibration, check out Teranex’s ClearVue monitoring system ($3,995 without a monitor, or $4,795 with a 24-inch 1920 x 1200 LCD monitor). It uses Silicon Optix’s Realta image processing engine to accurately map incoming signals pixel-by-pixel to the LCD’s native resolution. The Realta processor can handle an incredible 1 trillion operations per second. This monitoring system provides the real-time color calibration capabilities associated with broadcast CRT monitors, but at the higher resolutions associated with LCD monitors. When purchased with the accompanying monitor, ClearVue can provide D65 performance from lowlights to highlights."

By David English, Studio Monthly