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HP Dreamcolor
So we just got one here at our studio. For those that don’t know, here’s the hype on the product:
https://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/080610xd.html
It actually now costs $2500 instead of $3500.
This monitor is marketed and designed primarily to be used as a desktop monitor for Photoshop, CGI work, etc. However, it works really well as a broadcast monitor and it was definitely designed to function for this as well.
It has every input you can imagine except SDI/HD-SDI. But I’m using a Blackmagic converter to feed SDI to the HDMI port. It’s identical to having one built in.
The monitor is 1920×1200. There are three options for scaling. Unscaled, fill to screen, and fill to screen but maintain aspect ratio. Most would want to use the latter of the three. There’s also a fake overscan option for those who want the edges cropped as if it were a CRT monitor.
One concern I ran into is the colorspace menu was grayed out. After reading the manual, it says this feature is only available for RGB, not YUV. So you can only use it if you feed it 4:4:4 video. With NTSC and 4:2:2 HD signals it’s grayed out and you get a hue control instead. This may or may not be a problem. It’s possible that if it sees an NTSC signal, it just automatically uses 601, if it sees HD it uses 709. My guess is that’s how it works, but the manual isn’t clear so I don’t know for sure. I may call and find out.
As far as feeding it interlaced video. It deinterlaces it automatically, which is nice and it’s how the Panasonic pro monitors function. I have a lot of film-based standard-def video I work with, and it cleanly removes the 3:2 pulldown.
One annoyance is there’s no paper manual. You need Windows to launch the CD-rom app which contains the manual. After doing that once you can save a PDF of it or just print it.
Picture quality is amazing. Shadow detail is better than any LCD I’ve ever seen.
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5 Replies
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Nice…thanks for the report.
This monitor has Component ins, doesn’t it? Or did I read that wrong? And what about a BLUE ONLY option, does it have that? Can you use the controls on board to balance your bars?
Shane
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It has component. I don’t think it has blue-only but I’ll double-check. Not sure that’s important for a non-CRT, since one could just feed it a blue-filtered colorbars image.
Sean
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Hey Sean,
Regarding feeding a blue-filtered colorbar image:
A. How would you do that?
B. I recall talking about something like that in a thread last year, and someone said that wouldn’t work.
Can you elaborate?
Have a wonderful day.
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[Chris Poisson] “B. I recall talking about something like that in a thread last year, and someone said that wouldn’t work.
Can you elaborate?”
Well you’d have to find or a create a still image of blue-only colorbars and just load it in your FCP View and play it out. I too remember reading why it wouldn’t work, but that was for a CRT. Maybe someone who knows more could chime in.
Sean
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I’ve since learned a lot more about this thing.
First off, the REC 709 preset is wrong. I got in contact with someone and there I’m supposed to get some kind of firmware update that fixes this. The other presets are fine and Adobe sRGB is supposedly identical to 709 anyways.
Another problem is that the YUV mode is in fact not suitable for color grading out of the box. This thing was designed for RGB signals only. So one would have to use a Blackmagic HD-Link, not just a basic SDI to DVI converter that passes along YUV 4:2:2. The good thing is the HD-Link gives you a blue-only option and you can load custom LUTs. The bad news is there’s no deinterlacing and no scaling (except the option to show SD at 2x).
Sean
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