HDTV as monitor

[Jamie Franklin]

The only luck I have ever had with a reference monitor coming *close* to a realistic output is a plasma. Get some proper bars and you should be in the ball park…but I wouldn’t trust it 😉 The reds I find are always hot in my experience. LED and LCD are just wretched for reference imho. But maybe someone else has found a decent set…?

[Laco Gaal]

Sascha,

search the forums first, there were dozens of questions like these in the past year, already answered.
Also check https://liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php

[Sascha Engel]

Thanx for the link. Yes, I found stuff, but a lot of contradicting opinions, so I wanted to hear the POV from the COW people.

Sascha Engel
TIME BANDITZ Productions
http://www.youtube.com/taikang

[Laco Gaal]

there are forums on the COW about this question.
At the end, everybody will tell you that it is not a real solution… If you have the money for a HDTV, then spare some more for a HP Dreamcolor, or a used FSI, or a PF, or BT series Panasonic plasma.

[Sascha Engel]

Well, the only thing, that is apparently half way affordable are BON monitors.
Sadly, the prices for the brands are insane here and not realistic for freelance film makers.

Sascha Engel
TIME BANDITZ Productions
http://www.youtube.com/taikang

[Bill Ravens]

So, barring the perfect(and exhorbitantly priced) professional solution…
May I ask what delivery media most of your customers are viewing with?
It would be great to get the colors spot on, but, if all your customers are viewing wedding DVD’s on their home TV sets, for example, is it cost effective to grade on an HDTV?

It is quite disparaging to realize that most consumer viewers don’t have their home sets even remotely close to professional standards.

[Eric Hansen]

I have to disagree. Just because your clients and their customers are viewing on crap, doesn’t mean you should be grading on crap. You need to have a stable reference so when your client calls and complains about the blacks you can say, no, they are correct on my monitor, it’s your monitor that is wrong. Otherwise you will be second guessing yourself constantly and chasing your tail. I tried to go the cheap way out in the past and it drove me nuts because I never knew if what I was looking at was correct.

If you’re delivering mostly for web, then you can get away with a computer monitor. But it still needs to be calibrated so you can be confident in what you’re grading. No matter what display technology you choose, it must be calibrated otherwise there’s no point.

I’d say you can double check your work on a monitor like your client’s, but I would never grade on one. If their monitor skews green and yours skews magenta and you grade with that, then the image will be even more green on the client monitor than it would be if your monitor was correct. Working with this much variance is not what professionals do.

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Bill Ravens]

I don’t disagree with you, Eric. I’m just suggesting that if your clients are viewing on non-calibrated monitors, it’s ok to grade on a CALIBRATED LCD or Plasma. Just be aware that a consumer LCD/Plasma will NEVER be right, even if it’s “so-called” calibrated. A consumer LCD can be calibrated for white point, gamma, and luma at a single IRE level. Once you move off of 100% IRE, for example, all bets are off. Which means that the hi-lites may look good, but the mids and shadows will have a tint…..or the mids will look good while the hi-lites and shadows will have a tint….but, you get my point.There is no built in adjustment to correct these values and there is no sensor/software solution that will generate a useable LUT, that I’m aware of.