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| Monitors Evolve & Grow |
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June 30, 2010
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Projectors used to be popular for small- to medium-sized meeting
rooms and classrooms, but that niche is quickly being taken over by
large flat-panel displays. And with good reason: For the buck, flatpanel
displays have higher resolution, better speakers and are generally
less fussy than projectors.
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JVC DT-V24G1Z vectorscope
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by Bob Kovacs
One thing is certain: CRT monitors are being pushed out of classrooms,
meeting rooms and control rooms by various flat-panel technologies.
You can still buy a CRT monitor for a special task but the end
of the line is in sight for CRTs.
“I’d be hard-pressed to select a CRT over a flat-panel unit, even given the advantages conventional CRTs still have
over LCDs in colorimetry and viewing angle,” said
Jim Stanley, director of engineering for WLKY in
Louisville, Ky. “As of now, we no longer repair CRT
monitors; we replace them with flat-panels as they
fail.”
The larger size and greater flexibility of largescreen
displays is quickly making them the choice for
government facilities of all sorts, from airports to
council rooms. Multiviewers can divide a single
large-screen display into 16 or more independent
monitors, which is makes for greater flexibility in
control rooms and monitoring locations. Flexibility is
also necessary, such as novel ways to mount and
connect signals to monitors.
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Wohler Presto Front Panel
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“In the past, we had precision monitors for critical
applications, confidence monitors for where you
just need to confirm a signal’s presence, and regular
television sets for office and general off-air viewing,”
Stanley said. “With the advent of flat-panels
and HD, I think these distinctions have largely
blurred. We use HDMI inputs on consumer-grade
flat-panel sets (along with small SDI-to-HDMI converters)
to provide low-cost monitoring that works
surprisingly well for a variety of applications.”
BIGGER IS BETTER
The technology for large flat-panel displays has typically
been plasma, although large LCD displays
started reaching the market three or four years ago.
Both LCD and plasma have their advantages, and
plasma typically provides the widest viewing angles
and richest contrast.
“Our 1080P 50-, 58- and 65-inch professional
plasma displays are the most popular displays for
our government customers,” said Rick Albert, vice
president for flat panel displays at Panasonic
Solutions Co. “They are purchasing them for multiple
applications, but most recently the bigger projects
are for training and classrooms where they are
replacing projectors.”
JVC’s GM-F470S monitor is a 47-inch LCD model
with a very thin bezel that works well for video
walls. The GM-F470S has a wide viewing angle and
is designed for 24/7 operation.
The Vérité G-Series from JVC has two monitors to
support Verite standard 2D production, but with
added flexibility. The 17-inch DT-V17G1Z and 24-inch DT-V24G1Z have built-in waveform/vectorscopes,
audio level metering and LTC/VITC timecode
support, among many features.
“Our new top-of-the-line DTV displays are the
Vérité G-Series, which feature 3G, dual-link HD/SDSDI
inputs with 1080p/60 capability and digital
closed captioning,” said Dave Walton, assistant vice
president of marketing and communications for JVC
Professional Products.
OLED
A number of manufacturers have released professional
monitors using organic light-emitting diode
(OLED) technology, which has several advantages
over typical liquid crystal display (LCD) designs. With
an OLED display, the viewing surface is actually creating
the light that forms the image, instead of
using a backlight that LCD requires.
This means that OLED monitors can be really thin
and they usually have a very wide viewing angle.
Being thin also means that OLED monitors are lightweight.
On the downside, OLED displays are more expensive
to manufacture than LCDs, particularly at larger
sizes, and the current technology for OLED generally
has a shorter life than LCD monitors. OLED can
also be susceptible to burn-in, so manufacturers use
an “orbiting‚” technology similar to that on plasma
displays.
Marshall Electronics has a wide variety of monitors
in its Modular Design (MD) series, all of which
have the ability to connect to a range of input signals
depending on the supplied I/O modules. This
includes composite, component, SDI, HDMI, DVI
and even fiber-optic modules. For example, the
Marshall V-MD151-OLED is 15-inch desktop OLED
monitor that can support any of the company’s
input modules.
"It's definitely a future-proof solution,” said
Mark Fisher, marketing manager for Marshall
Electronics.
TVLogic has two new models that take monitor
technology in a couple different directions simultaneously,
with the recent announcement of a 15-inch
OLED field-production monitor, the LEM-150. The
company also unveiled a 56-inch 4K high-resolution
cinema post-production monitor, the LUM-560W,
which has a screen resolution of 3840x2160.
“The LEM-150 is ideal for critical field/camera
monitoring and on-set color grading,” said Wes
Donahue, marketing director for TVLogic USA.
“And the LUM-560W is designed for military and
surveillance applications requiring a full-featured
color-calibrated 4K display.”
Ikegami is one of the few manufacturers that still
makes CRT monitors, but its most recent monitor
announcements have been for LCD models. One
example is the HLM-1750WR, a 17-inch 1080p/60
display with a wide viewing angle and fast response
time. Unlike some specialty video production monitors,
the HLM-1750WR also works as a computer
monitor.
“The HLM-1750WR features a USB port for
transferring set-up files, wireless mouse control and
auto-set-up probe connection,” said Alan Keil, vice
president and director of engineering for Ikegami Electronics.
“The space-saving rackmount
design of the HLM-1750WR
is another advantage for production control
rooms.”
Wohler Technologies makes a number of flatscreen
monitors, mostly for rackmount and portable
applications. However, the Presto 1RU is something
different: It’s a 16x1 routing switcher with a tiny
OLED screen on each input button displaying the
signal on that input.
“No longer do you have to guess if you are
selecting the correct feed, bars or even black,” said
Jeff McNall, director of product development for
Wohler. “Within each selector button is an OLED
video display that has great contrast, brilliant colors
and no viewing angle barriers.”
EVALUATION MONITORS
As HD settles in as the standard for production and
display, nothing is more important than seeing
exactly what is contained in your signals. A precision
evaluation monitor can seem like a luxury when you
have so many monitors with great pictures, but it
can also show you at a glance what other monitors
may hide.
The BVM-L231 23-inch critical evaluation LCD
monitor from Sony has new optics and 3G input
capability, and it is calibrated to SMPTE C, EBU and
ITU-R.BT709 standards. It even has the ability to
grab a still image in TIFF format from
the displayed video, so that the image
can be evaluated elsewhere.
For less-critical production applications,
Sony’s line includes the PVM-740, a 7.4-inch OLED monitor for
rugged field use. Typical of OLED monitors,
its picture contrast is greater
than a CRT display, and is less affected
by ambient light—a special coating
provides protection from scratches
and enables a high transmission
rate of the internal light source to
keep the picture as bright as possible.
“Customers have been asking
for the next great display technology,
and for color correction and
critical picture evaluation, OLED
delivers everything they need and
much more,” said Gary Mandle,
senior product manager for professional
displays at Sony
Electronics.
The PRM-3G Precision LCD
series from Plura Broadcast is built
with Grade A LED backlight LCD panels
that provide accurate rendition of more than 1
million colors for monitor-critical applications. The
monitors in this series also have wide viewing
angles, on-screen waveform/vectorscopes, closed
captions and audio metering.
As diverse as LCD and OLED monitors are, they
still fall short of CRTs in at least one respect.
“Our plant, like many others, uses a mix of both
standard-definition and HD signals, and the multisync
capability of conventional CRTs makes a sharp
picture in both SD and HD,” WLKY’s Stanley said.
“Flat-panel monitors have a challenge with this,
given the fact that their native resolution is fixed. A
flat-panel monitor that could provide a truly sharp
picture across multiple signal resolutions is something
I’d really like to see.”
There’s a lot to see in monitors today and many
choices to make. One thing is certain: Monitors have
never been as capable as those available today and
government video users are finding advantages to
the newer large-screen models.
With large-screen LCD and plasma units, LED
backlit models and OLED technology starting to
move into the display mainstream, it looks like monitors
will be interesting for some time.
Bob Kovacs can be reached at bob@bobkovacs.com.
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