It's a dilemma faced by nearly every photo / video editor on the planet -- stick with a huge CRT for that precise color accuracy, or make the jump to LCD for aesthetics sake? Fret not, dear worriers, as Panasonic has supposedly crafted a miracle solution with the BT-LH1760. This April-bound production monitor is essentially devoid of attractiveness, but it does offer up a 120Hz refresh rate, an IPS panel with a 1,280 x 768 native resolution and "faithful color reproduction with twice the response speed of other currently available
professional LCD monitors." Furthermore, you'll find a built-in waveform monitor and vectorscope, pixel-to-pixel matching capabilities and a slew of inputs including DVI, auto-switching HD-SDI / SDI, component and VGA. Yeah, it's a pretty impressive array of specs for a 17-incher, but then again, most 17-inchers don't demand just under five large, either.
[Via
BroadcastBuyer]
posted Feb 20th 2008 1:02AM
I work in professional video, my company has the predecessor to this monitor (the 1700W), and it's pretty crappy. This newer model looks exactly the it, I bet besides perhaps a better screen it's mostly the same deal. The features like the vectorscope/waveform are in the 1700 already, and they didn't even bother to add HDMI, which I think should be as standard an option today as putting composite/component into past professional models has been.
I hope they improved the black levels (which sucked), but even then, it's really just too small. You don't want 42" in your face when cutting, but I'd rather go for for one of the 24" HD flatscreens that are out there, and in 1080p to boot. Consumers might be happy with 720p up to around 40" or so, but for a pro monitor, you should be able to expect full 1080p.
In professional video there isn't a choice any more. CRTs can not be had. To give a reference a typical broadcast reference monitor CRT cost around 1000$ per screen inch.
Given the broadcast centric features this monitor is meant to replace a 15-17k unit.
There is no professional level monitor out there that replaces CRT. Many people have tried to make some but unlike the age of CRT's, consumer televisions are pushing down the quality of lcd displays.
The technologies of sed, fed and oled fully match the requirements of response speed, contrast and color gamut. None of them are commercially available. I'm really hoping that a 20" oled comes our for around 20k. It would corner the market almost instantly.
The lack of professional level displays also points out a flaw in professional creation at this point. Places that make film can transition to DLP based projection units to make digital film.
For broadcast and dvd authoring there is a big problem. The previous standards itu.601 and rec.709 were designed to create ideal versions of home tvs. The 601 standard is for SD content and the 709 standard is for HD content. Now most homes have a wide array of technology with a vastly different display traits.
SD content has to look good on a HD display and to some extent vice versa. Dvd and HDM authoring facility now as a final step in quality control look at content on a
variety of consumer displays to make sure that it will look good in peoples homes.
The necessity of this step means that there needs to be a new standard for broadcast, with the possibility of greatly reduced performance, to match the current state of displays.
If the professional displays like this one can not even hit the broadcast standards what hope does a home tv with significantly worse video processing have?
BTW on a display like this HDMI is a bad idea unless you are leaving out hdcp compliance. You don't want to see your raw files through encryption.
Thanks for your astute, well informed post about a bewildering problem. Sony are you listening?