Thanks to intense market competition, the price of LCD monitors shown at the NAB Show is dropping so fast that other technologies such as OLED and plasma are facing tough price barriers, all to the benefit of the digital content creators who craft the images seen and evaluated on them.
Cheuk Pan (L) and Vincent Cheung, both from the Post Production Office in Hong Kong, check out the Dolby PRM-4200 reference monitor. The new SE line of HD monitors from Boland ranges from 9-inches up to 72 inches and claim ultra high contrast and “True Blacks” thanks to their backlight dimming brightness control.
Although no shipping date was announced, for the second year at the NAB Show, Canon displayed prototypes of some 30-inch 4K reference monitors that the company has under development.
The ColorEdge CG276 LCD monitor that EIZO brought to the show offers input support for 2K and 4K resolutions via its downscaling function at up to 30 fps though its DisplayPort input, presenting them natively at 2560 x 1440.
Teaming up with the Cameron|Pace Group and Royal Philips Electronics, Dolby announced a collaboration to use the Dolby 3D format in theatrical features and home displays. In the Dolby booth they had a 56-inch Dolby Professional Reference Monitor autostereoscopic 3D display showing scenes from Cameron blockbusters in the most effective glasses-free presentation seen so far.
Stuart Cameron (L) with Cache Media talks with Robert Foster about the Marshall Electronics QVW-2710 2K/4K monitor. Flanders Scientific had a new 32-inch reference monitor, the CM320TD, which is also a 3D-capable display featuring in-monitor multiplexing. The CM320TD includes a second generation Color Fidelity Engine (CFE2) allowing simultaneous application of Calibration and Look LUT’s.
Featuring a built-in H.264 recorder with 4 GB of internal memory and an SD slot for up to 32 GB of recording space, IKAN’s D7w 3G-SDI LCD monitor supports 2K resolutions and provides HDMI input to SDI output conversion.
Ikegami’s latest introduction was the HLM- 905WR 9-inch LCD monitor offering multiformat HD/SD SDI inputs, including two-channel 3G, and a one-channel analog composite input, waveform and vectorscope displays and a USB connector.
JVC displayed their new PS-840UD ProVérité 4K 84-inch quad HD (3840 x 2160) ELED Illuminated LCD monitor showing pictures at 60p with a120Hz refresh rate and 10 bit color depth. The PS-840UD gets its input from a variety of HD and 4K sources, including HDMI 1.4a (single cable 4K up to 30p) and HDMI 1.3 (four cable 4K up to 60p).
Ray Kalo (R) answers questions about the Plura Broadcast SFP-217-3G 17-inch monitor from Israel Gomez with Comtelsat. Now featuring wireless HDI in their camera top monitors such as the 4-inch V-LCD4-PRO-L, Marshall Electronics also unveiled their new QVW-2710, a 27-inch 2K/4K-capable modular quad viewer, boasting a resolution of 2650 x 1440 and featuring an HD quad splitter, IMD, audio presence indicator and time code.
The Nebtek SOLAR56HD SC is a 5.6-inch, 800 nit LCD monitor, designed with the Steadicam user in mind, featuring an 8-pin LEMO & Leveling software in addition to a WXGA screen.
With their new BT-4LH310, a 31-inch 4096 x 2160 resolution LCD display, Panasonic is enabling 4K/2K monitoring in the field with a 10-bit IPS panel that provides native 4K resolution. Panasonic also showcased their BT-LH2170 LCD monitor, a 21.5-inch premium performance production monitor with native 1920 x 1080 HD resolution and advanced 2D and 3D assist features.
The 84-inch Planar UltraRes 4K display product line is designed for ultra-high resolution (3840 x 2160) commercial applications using LED-lit LCD technology, boasting selectable dynamic contrast and local dimming for enhanced contrast.
Serhiy Smirnov from Avid admires the TVLogic LUM-300W 30-inch DCI 4K monitor. Plura Broadcast’s new SFP-3G Full HD 1920 x 1080 Precision Broadcast LCD series of monitors (17-, 21-, 24-, 32- inch) supports up to 3 Gbps 1080/60p along with all other digital and analog inputs. The SFP-3G series can convert the SD/HD/3G input to HDMI output.
Creating OLED reference monitors has been the goal for Sony over the past several years, and at this year’s show they introduced their new 30-inch (4096 x 2160) and 56-inch (3840 x 2160) 4K “A” Series Trimaster EL OLED professional displays. These include the BVM-E250A and BVM-E170A models for highend cinema and broadcast applications, BVM-F250A and BVM-F170A displays for TV production and broadcasting, and the versatile PVM-2541A and PVM-1741A picture monitors for a wide range of monitoring applications.
Creators of the world’s first on-camera HD monitor, SmallHD debuted its DP7-Pro OLED camera display that covers 100 percent of the NTSC color gamut and offers inky dark black levels. The DP7-Pro series comes in three display choices: OLED, “High-Bright” IPS LCD (1000+ nit) and IPS LCD.
ToteVision had their 70-inch AIO-7000 LED/LCD active matrix HD monitor on display with integrated PC and multitouch capabilities, and 6 USB inputs along with two HDMI ports. It offers 450cd/m2 (Nit) brightness and a 4000:1 contrast ratio.
The new RainbowHD from Transvideo is a rugged 7-inch monitor with a fully sealed body machined in avionics aluminum, meaning no holes and no noisy fans. They also displayed their RainbowHD SBL SuperBright 7-inch model (1000Nits) with advanced functionalities.
At the TVLogic booth we saw a new 30- inch 4K DCI monitor, the LUM-300W, specifically designed for demanding 4096 x 2160 DCI 4K digital cinema monitoring alongside the 56-inch LUM-560W 10-bit 3840 x 2160 display designed for UHDTV.
ViewZ USA had a new 47-inch LED-backlit reference monitor with 12-bit processing at their booth, the VZ-470PM-3G. The 1920 x 1080 resolution display features 2K input capability, waveform, vectorscope and 16 channel audio monitoring.
Wohler showcased three new additions to its DVM MPEG family of video monitors: the new 5RU, dual 10-inch screen DVM-5210; DVM-4290, with two 9-inch screens; and the DVM-3270, boasting a pair of 7-inch screens. All of the DVM MPEG monitors provide at-a-glance monitoring from 3G/HD/SD-SDI inputs, MPEG-2/4 ASI, and Ethernet IP streams.
