Sometimes the only way to ensure that your on camera talent is saying what needs to be said is with a teleprompter.
With their eyes on the same plane as the lens, a teleprompter is unmatched in what it can do. Having improved greatly, you no longer have to sling a heavy CRT under your camera and muscle the back end to keep it level—a laptop now works fine.
Autocue QTV has created an excellent series of prompters and I’ll be looking at the PSP 17.
The 17-inch review prompter I received was meant to be used with JVC’s studio-configured 250 line, but the prompter arrived before the camera. I ended up using our Sony HVR-Z1U, which had to be elevated slightly to fit onto the camera mount and still be able to see through the partially silvered mirror. Both larger and smaller prompters are available, but the 17-inch LCD seemed like the right size for our needs.
With a MRSP of $4,495, the PSP 17 comes with AC power supply, a BNC cable, a mounting bracket, a gold plate, the mirror, an angle hood and black cloth to keep the light out. The only other necessary item is a sturdy tripod.
With everything well packaged for shipment, the PSP 17 was not too difficult to assemble. I did have a momentary lapse in my motors skills when I tried to attach the glass to the hood, but other than that, a child could do it (if you can find one).
The cables plug in on the back of the monitor and are a little awkward to reach because of the closeness of the monitor to its mounting brackets. The extremely long BNC cable was our choice, but S-Video, DVI, or VGA may be used if preferred. The side of the monitor has the power switch, menu, up, down, and auto settings. Once plugged into the wall and powered, the only other option was selecting the right input.
The PSP 17 also had numerous display and image settings: contrast, hue, saturation, black level, phase, flesh tone, image pan and zoom. All of these features worked perfectly out
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CHUCK GLOMAN
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of the box and the only thing I had to do was to horizontally pan the image slightly to see all of the words with the font I had selected.
Autocue also makes the QPro-prompting software (via CD), dongle and Contour’s Shuttle Xpress (which controls and activates the prompter program). For an additional $1,395, this software will take a script in almost any form and convert it to a “promptable” script. (I’m not reviewing this software because we were adding an additional prompter set up to our TV studio and already had software.)
I used our existing prompter software, and the 720x400 resolution on the flatscreen was easily readable at a distance of 10 feet. The two other dinosaurs in our TV studio are heavy CRTs from the mid-1990s that require weights on the back of the pedestal plate for balance. The PSP 17 is larger than our 15-inch CRTs and is less than 1 inch thick, functioning perfectly on a smaller tripod rather than using a pedestal. When the JVCs arrive, our older NTSC Hitachi
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The Autocue QTV PSP 17
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cameras will also disappear as will our older teleprompters.
Students use our TV studio almost every waking hour (and some not so waking) and the old black and white CRTs are heavy and give off a lot of heat. If we want the talent to emphasize something, using colored text or color underscoring is now possible with the PSP 17.
We always had color prompting software, just had no color monitor to display it. The new flatscreen monitor is mounted with Camera Two in our three-camera set up and now the other two older monitors are seldom used.
Now the smaller, sharper, lighter 17-inch monitor is the only one that sees any use. There’s really nothing not to like about the PSP 17. It is the perfect size, has sharp enough resolution for your text needs, takes up very little space and weight on the front of your camera and requires only cleaning as maintenance. The text as it scrolls does not seem pixilated or jaggy and with adjustable backlighting controls, you can customize your screen.
Cameras have gotten smaller and more cost effective. Why shouldn’t teleprompters do the same thing? And now they have.
Chuck Gloman is program director of the TV/Film Department as well as a member of the faculty at DeSales University. He may be reached chuck.gloman@ desales.edu.
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