> "What do you like? Recommend?"

I really love my two 24" ASUS ProArt PA246Q's. Very accurate color reproduction for video.

~jr

I really liked those too, JR, but no real estate (or cash). :-)
Tom

Thanks JR. I saw another post from you recommending this monitor and I'm planning on picking one up. How's the eye strain thus far?

Thanks

I also just recently bought one of these, along with a Pantone Huey for color calibration. These are flourescent backlit. Some people say that flourescent can give you a little better color range than LEDs. That may be true but I think flos and LEDs all have color spikes and valleys.

The more important thing is that these use an IPS panel. These generally have decent color reproduction and wide viewing angles. The wide angle is important because the image will look the same to you and the person sitting next to you.

Ergonomically, although I've been using dual displays for the last 15 years, I'm kind of leaning these days towards the idea of a main screen directly in front of you and a secondary screen to one side, rather than two identical screens side by side. This way you aren't always looking to one side or the other.

Rob Mack

"Some people say that flourescent can give you a little better color range than LEDs."

Some people are wrong.

There are two kinds of LED backlit monitors. Pro and consumer. The HP DreamColor LP2480zx Professional Display sells for about $2,000. What does that extra $1700 buy you? Precise colors *and* precise white background *and* real blacks. They get the precise white by adjusting the backlight RGB LED's for a calibrated white. Black is possible because the LED backlight can be turned off at the pixel layer. No consumer LED display is capable of this yet.

Steve

"They get the precise white by adjusting the backlight RGB LED's for a calibrated white. Black is possible because the LED backlight can be turned off at the pixel layer. No consumer LED display is capable of this yet."

RGB LEDs are incapable of producing white light. You can calibrate an RGB LED to read white with a conventional colour analyser but the analyser is incapable of reading the error. You have to resort to using a spectrometer to see the gaps in the emission spectra.

The RGB LEDs illuminate regions of the display, not individual pixels. If you want that fine detail level control then OLED displays are the only ones that offer a solution apart from CRTs.

I think Sony produced a RGB dynamic backlit HDTV but the price soon killed it off. The other factor that works against this technology in the home is the depth of the display.

Not to say that the Dreamcolor is not a very desirable piece of kit. I just couldn't justify the investment and went with the Asus ProArt which is excellent value for the money and should be affordable by many more Vegas users than the Dreamcolor.


Bob.

The advertised LED monitors are not LED monitors. They are LCD monitors with LED backlight. Real LED monitors do not commercially exist yet, and are completely different as they have each pixel being 3 directly-radiating LEDs (current technology is OLEDs).

I hassled Samsung locally because customers really thought they were getting something totally different, and they now advertise as LED-LCD monitors. But they never advertised previously as flourescent-LCD... ;-
geoff

Ergonomics as it relates to monitors is an important consideration.
I worked in a newsroom in the early '80s when we went from electric IBM typewriters to a word processing system.
Our engineers placed the monitors about 45 degrees to the right at work stations, and after a few years I developed terrible neck pain. Who knew from ergonomics then.
With the help of a phone book (remember those) and replacing the monitor to centre, and raised a few cms, the problem was recified.
I appreciate havng the main editing monitor in front.

I'm with Tom.
Jist tossed he old CRT back up on the IKEA Jerker with the LCD.
May get the ASUS when the price comes down JR. I now have a short term goal.

Interesting bit Geoff, wondering why we we're suddenly seeing this LED-LCD designation. Thanks for clearing up the confusion. Same applies for TVs too I would imagine.

"...That may be true but I think flos and LEDs all have color spikes and valleys."

Thanks Steve for pointing out my weasel-wording. I was in a hurry.

RGB LEDs have much better color reproduction and they can be tuned to yield a very good white. A high end professional display like the LP2480zx might come with it's own colorometer, or you might need to buy one as an accessory.

At the lower end of the market you'll have either LED or florescent backlights. I doubt that either would ever have a completely flat output spectrum. In either case you could have a little more or less green or magenta. You need to just find tests and reviews to get some sense of which monitor will do well.

IPS screens are a good start. I think if a manufacturer is using that sort of screen they'll say so but the key giveaway is that an IPS screen will have a 178 degree horizontal and vertical viewing angle.

The viewsonic monitor that JR mentions has a flourescent backlight. One thing I've noticed with it is that it needs a few minutes to warm up before the color stabilizes. However, once it's warm it's pretty reliable.

I recently bought this screen because I needed to bring a lot of photoshop work home and was finding that my older TN screen was just impossible to work on. It just couldn't match my screens at work so I couldn't do consistent work. I was also finding that the color of things changed just by moving my head or leaning back in my chair. An IPS panel shouldn't give you that problem.

Rob

The LED/LCD thing is just marketing. The nice thing about an LED backlight is that it uses less power and allows for a thinner monitor or TV. Those are nice things and vendors want you to know that it's a selling feature.

LED backlights don't contain mercury. This is also an important point since many countries regulate toxic metals in products.

Rob

Could someone please explain to me why colour spikes and valleys should be an issue?

We start of with a tri-colour sensor in our camera, so spectral spikes and valleys in the source light will be lost. Then we view the end result with tri-colour sensors in our eyeballs, so spectral spikes and valleys generated in the display will also be lost.

"Could someone please explain to me why colour spikes and valleys should be an issue?"

The red, green and blue colors used in video imaging are broad spectrum that overlap.
Now if you illuminate a subject with RGB LEDs of the same dominant wavelength that have a very narrow spectrum you have a problem with blended colors, they can simply read as black. Certain materials will only reflect light of a narrow spectrum and if that wavelength is missing in the illuminant source no light is reflected and detected by the camera or the eye in extreme cases.

White LEDs that use a phosphor have another similar problem, the dominant peak from the blue LED used to excite the phosphor. They also have significant dips in their emmision spectra. You can take the peaks out using gels but there is no way to fill in the dips, the light of the required wavelength just isn't there.

All of this creates another problem. Color meters that read Color Temperature and Color Rendition Index using a only three sensors cannot detect this problem and simply give false results. To get real answers a spectrometer is called for.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has done some very thorough work on this. Whilst it mostly relates to those shooting film the basics are the same for video. You can find links to the videos here.

Bob.

I see a problem with illuminating subjects with LED devices, where the LED brightness peaks and dips will interact with the subject's reflectivity peaks and dips, but in the context of monitors, what is the significance? What is being illuminated but our eyes, which have smoothish sensitivity within each colour band?

but in the context of monitors, what is the significance?

First off, Bob covered it.

One point of significance is simply confidence. You want to be confident that your display is showing you a true representation of what you shot. When I look around my office here (which has an open floor plan), I see LCD screens that tend towards green, towards magenta (sometimes side by side), sometimes I see highlights blowing out... basically they just all vary and if I pick up some work that someone else previously started it may look very different on my screen than theirs. (This is inexcusably sloppy screen calibration in our workplace, btw.)

Although I mostly work in Photoshop these days, I still do some professional lighting a grip work. I can tell you from experience that HMIs, Flos, and LEDs often have wildly varying green and magenta outputs which are much more disturbing to me than a warm/cold swing would be. This can give an overall cast to an image that you may or may not be able to see in real life or on your LCD or CRT display, depending on how good your eye is. However, you might see it in scopes, and you'd definitely see it if your monitor's backlight compounds the problem, in which case you might find yourself overcorrecting.

Think of it like audio monitors that overemphasize bass frequencies. You might try to correct this but if your monitor speakers aren't flat you might be doing more harm than good.

The other thing about a color spike or valley is that it can make some colors look identical when they aren't. This is similar to some types of color blindness.

Now, in my opinion, a reasonably good display covers the problems of peaks and valleys "good enough" so I wouldn't stress about it too much if you feel you have a good display and you make some attempt to calibrate it. The problem is really more with really bad screens. It's also a matter of how you define "good enough".

Rob

At the risk of exposing my ignorance, what about using a high quality 1080p HDMI LCD TV as your workscreen (not just external fullscreen preview)? True that would be 1080 instead of 1200 that the Asus ProArt has, but that aside wouldn't fullscreen preview give you a closer approximation of what your delivered video would look like (assuming you're audience will watch it on a TV)?

One of my monitors just died, so I was tossing this idea around.

I tried using my 1080p 50" plasma TV as a monitor, but the video card defaulted to a lower resolution. When I manually set it to 1920x1080, the view was cropped all round, presumably due to so-called "overscan". I suspect that my TV really has only say 1728x972 pixels. (I haven't tried counting them yet.) Is that how all large 1080p TVs behave?

I use two 32" Sharp (wish I had the Sony's) 1080P HDTVs and the overscan can be adjusted by setting the Tv's to "dot x dot" which will give you the full screen in 1920 x 1080 x 60hz mode. Some older video card softwares will not give you the overscan adustment capability. If your going through a KVM switch most of them will not pass 1920 x 1080P x 60hz to the DVI HDTV input.
JJK

> "Thanks JR. ...How's the eye strain thus far?"

I calibrated it with my Spyder3 Elite and it had me turn the luma way down and it's fine now. Everything is in balance so no eye strain at all.

~jr

PeterDuke, JJKizak, JohnnyRoy...

So how is using these HDTVs as PC monitors vs "real" monitors? Pros/Cons?

Thanks

I was looking for a way to view photos in my lounge at the best possible resolution using Powerpoint (so I could step through at my pace). I haven't pursued that idea further.

RGB LEDs are incapable of producing white light. You can calibrate an RGB LED to read white with a conventional colour analyser but the analyser is incapable of reading the error. You have to resort to using a spectrometer to see the gaps in the emission spectra.
RGB LEDs can produce white LED. One could argue that you would have problems with metamerism. Human beings looking at the RGB LED white may see a slightly different color.

In practice, I don't think that this would be an issue at all. You're just not going to notice it. (We rarely notice metamerism problems in general.)

----

There are advantages and disadvantages to the various backlighting setups. eCinema's lowest end $4k monitor still used a fluorescent backlight last time I checked (though this is a few years ago).

Fluorescent backlight
Pretty good uniformity horizontally... because the fluorescent light is one long strip of light.

white LED backlighting
A LED is a point source of light, so getting the backlight uniform across the screen will take a little more work.
But the real problem is when one LED ages faster than another LED. So the higher-end eCinema monitors, I believe, has internal sensors that compensate for this.

RGB LED backlighting
Achieving uniformity is a little harder than white LED backlighting because the distance between LEDs is 3X.
Allows for adjustments to white point without the problems of trying to adjust white point digitally.


There are other differences. With LED backlighting, you can dim the LEDs easily. And you can turn them on/off really fast, so you can play games with them to try to improve how motion is rendered on a LCD and to deal with problems in response time. (But to me it just doesn't look the same as a CRT. / Sometimes you see flicker.)

IMLED individually modulated LED
This technology has problems to overcome, at least for professional reference use.

What do you like? Recommend? as a replacement for the old CRT?
a CRT?

Seriously. If you do SD work, hang onto that CRT! But only if it's a TV.
Partial explanation:
http://www.glennchan.info/articles/technical/external-video-monitoring.html

drmayer:
Never could afford a real monitor in the 30" range ($5000 to $30,000) plus when I was looking for smaller monitors they would not show 1920 x 1080 full screen. (black bars). Since I am a hobbiest the 1080P 32" HDTVs work well when calibrated frequently as the backlight slowly diminishes and the color sometimes starts to increase for no reason. My Sony XBR2 has done this (2006) and also has acquired a small red shift I believe caused by the blue/green screen adjustments which are set by the inside processor. The Sony XBR6 hasn't changed the backlight yet but has increased the color some. I was too cheap to spring for the manuals and the code key for entering the inside stuff like I did with the old Sony CRT (2003). There are way too many adjusments that are not clear. The linearity of the CRTs is not in the same ballpark as the LCD/LED sets unless you set the picture to be viewed in the smallest center of the screen like they do at the TV station. Then you wind up with an 8" x 8" picture size.
JJK