!! I’m Spending Money !! – HD client monitors?

[Jerry Hofmann]

Probably should look at a CRT if you ask me, but if that’s out of the budget, look at the pro HD monitors from Sony, JVC, and Panasonic… I’m not using anything but CRT’s so can’t attest to lag with the new LCD HD Pro monitors, anyone?

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer

Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here

Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D

[Dom Silverio]

You don’t have much choice for that money.

Either find somewhere the discontinued PVM 20L5 and get the HD-SDI option board (about 5-6500 total)

or use widescreen LCD monitors from Apple, Dell, Sony or HP.

[Richard Martz]

Isn’t it great to be able to spend money? Sure beats other way.

I just looked at the Apple 30″ Cinema display and while it really does have a nice picture I was thinking the whole time that maybe what I should do is just go to projection. No matter what you do you are going to have problems getting colors to match exactly from display to display. Obviously if you have an attentive engineering staff who can use color comparators on your monitor displays and adjust those on a daily basis then you’ll have no problems finding a display that you like.

For the rest of us however the choices are somewhat more limiting. I used to work for Crawford Communications. They’re huge! 27 acres of the best toys, 20 Editing suites, great people. When they built their new high-end editing suites they put in video projectors and that is what the clients view. They have changed them out a couple of times to get something that really works well. You can contact Ron Heidt at 678-421-6600 or by email rheidt@crawford.com to ask him what they have now.

The problem with showing clients HDTV on a small monitor is that (according to studies) it really doesn’t look like HD until the monitor size approaches 36″ or larger in diagional measure. The clients can’t tell it is HDTV or not!!! So even the Apple 30″ cinema display does not really look that much like HDTV. So bigger is better at least when it comes to HDTV display for clients.

The tried and true method of getting correct color is to use a CRT monitor and keep it in adjustment. However some of the new plasma screens are pretty good and have very fine detail. The problem is your budget. To get a really great HDTV that has a true resolution of 1080i you will probably have to spend double your budget for a true reference monitor. You can also expect to spend another $2500 on test equipment to keep it in adjustment if you son’t already own that equipment.

Sony has their BVM-D monitors but to get a 20″ set you’ll have to spend around $12K. And even if you do spend that much you’ll only get around 700 lines of resolution. Panasonic has a much cheaper line of monitors but you can’t beat them at their own game. You will get what you pay for.

So what do you do for $6600? Pick out a monitor (either CRT, LCD, or plasma) that you just love and adjust it for the best picture. If you do that you might just have enough cash left to buy a nice couch for the clients as well. Or if that doesn’t work for you I suggest that you use a High Resolution Video Projector and enjoy a truly LARGE FORMAT picture.

Thoughts from others?

[Joe Murray]

Check out http://www.ecinemasys.com. I’ve heard really great things about their monitoring for HD. Only drawback is if you want a really big monitor, it doesn’t seem like they offer that right now, but they do have a product (EDP100) that does a good job of converting an HD signal for an Apple 23″ Cinema Display.

Joe Murray

[Jerry Hofmann]

Not a bad suggestion at all Richard. Those projectors would be pretty awesome to look at, however they go through expensive lamps a lot…

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer

Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here

Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D

[Richard Martz]

Dear Jerry:

You are right. The drawback with projection is the cost of lamps. Still you can get about 600-800 hours on a lamp if you are careful with it. Depending on the projector you have, it could cost $400-500 every six months to lamp that projector. So that is a significant expense over the cost of maintaining a CRT display – unless you consider the cost of an engineer. Still a CRT display is really not the same as a large client Monitor is it?

If I wanted to get away from projection then I would do the next cheapest and best thing. Make a trip to Circuit City or Sams Club and pick out the largest HDTV display (Plasma probably, or smaller LCDs). Many of these sets have virtually every concievable connector on them and some even have SDI inputs. They also produce very good color with very low lag. Unfortunately some of the cheaper ones do have a slight bit of a delay so they may not sync up with your audio monitors very well. One advantage to monitoring this way is that you’ll also have a perfect understanding of what the folks at home are going to see. I guess there is really no perfect solution for this situation. But you can solve everything eventually by throwing gobs of money at the problem. HD Jumbotron anyone?

Rock on dude. What-everrr.