Like Glenn said. Basically the answer is "no".

Even calibration discs like the Avia "Guide to Home Theater" are difficult to use with an LCD display.

John

So this is good and bad news.
My main monitor's beginning to have these fuzzy mood swings sometimes so I guess it's for soon. I would have expected the LCDs to be kind of top notch nowadays (so much for eyestrain) but going again with a CRT will save me bucks.
Thanks guys !

I have 4 LCD monitors and the Sony and one of the Viewsonics is tinted toward red. The other two Viewsonics are fairly neutral. The one thing I love about the LCD monitors are the absolutely perfect linearity.
I always wondered why the broadcast engineers used only the small center section of their CRT monitors, maybe for linearity reasons. Even my Sony HDTV CRT bends telephone poles sligthly.
JJK

Affordable LCDs will never make good color reference monitors. Two main reasons that this won't happen. The color of white depends on the color of the backlight, and black is an illusion because the LCD cell can never go opaque. Last the range of control of the intensity of each cell is limited resulting in a smaller gamut.

The reference LCD monitors are very expensive. I think that Sony's is around $6,000. It does not have a cold-cathode backlight, but instead it has a matrix of white LEDs.

The worst problem with LCD displays is the viewing angle. Ten degrees off-center and you start seeing a different contrast.

For this reason, we will still have glass CRT monitors for a while, but they are going to be really expensive because the factories that make CRTs are getting out of the consumer end of the business. If 99% of your business goes away, guess who picks up the remaining costs?

There is hope, though. It comes in the OLED displays.

OLED displays will have a vastly higher resolution then LCDs because there's more pixel elements in a given space than LCDs. The viewing angle is almost 180-degrees because there is no sandwich of backlight, filter and LCD shutter as in LCD displays. The light emitter is right up front. Black is black because the pixel elements can be turned completely off, and white is white because the display can operate at a higher frequency than LCDs, providing a much bigger gamut that includes white. The higher frequency is because the latency of LEDs is measured in picoseconds while LCD latency is in the milliseconds, meaning no more motion artifacts from the screen.

What's not to like in OLED displays? For now, price. OLED displays suffer from one perplexing problem - yield. The manufacturers just haven't gotten the yeild good enough to make OLED monitors over 4-inches profitable.

Chances are good that you have an early model of OLED right now on your digital camera or cell phone.

Steve M.

The color of white depends on the color of the backlight
The white point of a LCD monitor can be changed by changing the (r/g/b gains in the) monitor's LUT.

, and black is an illusion because the LCD cell can never go opaque.
A CRT can't achieve perfect blacks either, since there is a little bit of glare in the screen. It should be proportional to the luminance of the screen. The method used to measure this is very important... many common tests skew the results (i.e. measuring a full screen of black, or checkerboard patterns of white and black).

There's also individually modulated LED LCDs coming out... a LED controls each element, so excellent black level can be achieved.

Further down the horizon, SED displays may be coming out... their theoretical specs are excellent, although it's unknown whether or not they can be produced cheaply.

2- You might want to specify for what use the monitor will be used for.

Rec. 709 video: The monitor should have a gamut equal to or greater than the Rec. 709 gamut.

Print, film work: The monitor should have as wide a color gamut as possible.

Everything I've read, and my own very limited experience, make me pretty convinced that current LCDs are not even close to CRTs.

One small evolutionary step that may help is LED back-lighting for LCDs, which is just starting to make its way to market.

Despite the significant deficiencies in LCD color gamut and poor ability to render highlights and shadows, I will never go back to CRTs for the simple reason that I value my eyesight. I ruined my eyes by years of staring at a CRT monitor. This has nothing to do with emissions and all that European trade union nonsense, and everything to do with flicker. Since I switched to LCDs several years ago, I no longer go through bottles of eye-drops, I no longer have headaches, and I can see better.

So, I don't even bother to consider CRTs even though I know they are superior.

There's another bigger problem with OLEDs, they don't last and they fade a different rates, hardly a good thing in a precision monitor.

Projectors seem to be the weapon of choice these days for color grading, needless to say though we're not talking $5K units.

On the LCD front I think Eizo have a 24" unit that gets pretty good press but a tad expensive.

Bob.

LCD monitors have a few things going for them; energy efficient, small foot-print and excellent geometric linearity, but when it comes to pure image quality, I haven't seen anything yet that can beat a high-quality, properly adjusted CRT.

John

Good thread, and I always get the same remarks on my crt's from friends who wouldn't have thought twice - "What's with the HUGE mons? Why havn't you moved to a flatscreen?"

...because I work with video.

Isn't there a gadget called a Spyder that can set a computer monitor to mimic NTSC-TV color? Even flat screens? (For purposes of 'roughing in' footage, or for family archives, not to substitute for a reference monitor when the time comes).

Isn't there a gadget called a Spyder that can set a computer monitor to mimic NTSC-TV color?
=============
Yes there is.

Some of the people on the AVS forum seem to like it.

John

There's also individually modulated LED LCDs coming out... a LED controls each element, so excellent black level can be achieved.

I saw a 200,000:1 contrast large LCD monitor with this technology a year ago at SIGGRAPH (and reviewed it here), looked really nice all the way from pitch dark to blindingly white. Only $1,000 per inch (it cost $40K for a 40" screen...), but that is not such a bad price actually for a high quality screen of this size.

European trade unions stupid with their insistence on electromagnetic field control? AFAIK, there is only on union involved, TCO (largest whitecollar union) in Sweden, and they developed measurement standards that were quickly adopted worldwide.

I've measured the magnetic field from my own past CRTs, got several milliGauss at eyeball distance, and that is definitely not healthy, regardless of whether you are aware of it or not.

There's not one shred of evidence to suggest that magnetic fields are harmful. Needless to say there's also no proof that they aren't however compared to the other emissions from CRTs they'd be pretty low down on my list of things to frett over. Keep in mind also the truly HUGE magnetic fields used in medical imaging devices.

The thing that I've been glad to get rid of along with CRTs is the high frequency audio noise.

Bob.

i use a gretag macbeth spectrophotometer to set up/calibrate both my CRT and my Sony wide screen lcd. I do a great deal of color printing and have found this cal to work quite acceptably on either the CRT or the LCD. True, on the lcd blacks arent truly black, so, exactly what's ur point?If u can read your vectorscope, u know where tru black is..

Actually, ColorVision's Spyder is for calibrating monitors for those who work in printed graphics, creating profiles that will accurately reproduce the graphics when printed. It is not for calibrating a computer monitor to NTSC standards.

jay..

quite tru...however, the dearth of calibrating colorimeters for video work is the mother of invention. altho' it's calibrated to rgb, its a standard that allows repeatable color reproduction on the screen, be it crt or lcd. once one gets used to what "looks right" for NTSC, one can make ANY monitor reproduce that look. The killer is when each monitor produces a different result....it's about standardization against some metric, even if its not an NTSC metric. Your brain does the rest...assuming it hasn't been corrupted by someone like spielberg...LOL

Bill, my only point was that it is neither sold nor advertised as a calibration tool for video nor the NTSC standard. To call it anything other than what it is, in my opinion, is inaccurate and misleading.

once one gets used to what "looks right" for NTSC, one can make ANY monitor reproduce that look.

That would take one remarkable brain and set of eyes!

- The NTSC standard for the primaries' chromaticities (the exact color of r/g/blue) is quite outdated and impratical. It's a really big gamut... monitor manufacturers moved away from it since it hinders screen luminance.

The standards now are Rec. 709, SMPTE C, and EBU. Few facilities follow Rec. 709... a lot of color grading work is still done to SMPTE C for HD work. So while Rec. 709 is supposed to be the standard for HD, in practice it doesn't exactly happen.

True, on the lcd blacks arent truly black, so, exactly what's ur point?
That will screw up the appearance of colors and limit the color gamut on the low end.

2- For video, color management should be really easy since you only have one output device- the standardized reference monitor. Buy a reference monitor, and you have accurate color (well that, and you have to change your computer monitors and viewing environment around). Theoretically anyways.

For print work, more complicated solutions are needed since your output device is a combination of pritner, ink, and paper. Also, you don't need high performance.

For film work, color management is more like print since there are various output devices (which are combinations of film printer + film stock). It differs in that high performance is necessary.

Some people would like to see the economies of scale from print color management translate over into film/video. This might happen in the future as the technologies are moving closer together... however:
A- Getting a broadcast monitor is a nice solution, since it doesn't take up a computer monitor, broadcast monitors can show over/underscan, they can take video inputs / can be patched around, etc. They are also reasonably cheap.
B- Vegas currently doesn't support the full extent of ICC color management AFAIK... so tools like the Spyder won't do a complete job. The Sypder doesn't do a perfect job anyways.

ok, i get your point, glenn. in fact, i have a calibrated broadcast monitor. u make an interesting point about the variations in video output devices. most of my video output is via DVD. a short bit of research into DVD player standards will reveal that there ARE NONE!! In other words, the color of video varies greatly according to the playback device, as well as the playback monitor. In my experience, clients' monitors are not only NOT calibrated, but they're using some low end dvd player whose got the whole method of SETUP level and RGB color totally wrong. Even some expensive DVD players have SETUP all wrong. I drove myself crazy trying to get video that looked technically perfect on my workstation, only to find the vast variations out in the field...i.e. the client's office.

So, here we are picking nits over how we calibrate out workstation monitor when the whole problem goes unstandardized by DVD player manufacturers. I submit to you it's a waste of time to spend too much time and money trying for a "perfect" picture in the perfect world of your workstation, because there's no such thing as perfect out in the field.

It's the equivalent of editting audio thru a very nice set of reference audio monitors, then the client plays the audio CD in a cheap boombox.

This is why I ALWAYS do a sample of the client's playback system before I balance my color. In some rare cases, I'll calibrate a client's monitor as an added bonus to my contract. Sometimes they're pleased, sometimes not, becasue they got used to seeing corrupted colors before the calibration of their monitor. Oh well, go figure.

I think we can agree that this lack of standardization is no excuse for us professionals to not try to maintain some standard of repeatability. I have my method, and it works quite well. Maybe my eyes are calibrated....maybe Jay's arent. Who's to know? If u have one client, by all means get him calibrated and then work to some standard u agree on. If u have many clients with many playback systems, prepare to tear your hair out.

Theory works very well in the controlled conditions of the laboratory. When one goes into the field, there are no rules.

Bill - it seems like your point about repeatability is a big one. Even if the end user's color calibration is wrong, at least it'll be consistently wrong if the content producers use some sort of standard. But it also seems you are right in that it's not worth going overboard.

In Rich Harrington's "Photoshop for Video" training series he says it's very important that you should turn color management OFF in Photoshop. This is because CRTs don't use ICC profiles. He says you want to look at the color in its raw, unaltered form on the PC, then you can preview it out via FW to the television / CRT (Adobe Photoshop CS2 lets you do this).

But obviously you would still calibrate the PC's monitor itself, and you would calibrate the broadcast CRT monitor (i.e. with NTSC color bars, etc.).