[Robert Ruffo]

I understand these perceptual differences – but that does not explain the Lightspace report I posted which you have not responded to.

Your eyes do adjust to slight backlight temperature issues when they affect the whole image unilaterally, as long as that issue is subtle, but not to a particular color being under-gamut to a varying degree based on its brightness level.

This was done with a high-end probe – it is not just perception. The fact that the probe’s findings match observed perception does not take take anything away from them – on the contrary.

We grade based on observed color. EIther a monitor “looks right” compared to a very carefully calibrated rec 709 standard Dolby used to grade 100 million Hollywood features (the reference here) – or it looks different. If it looks perceptually different it is not much helping the colorist, regardless of why. If you are using some form of backlight tech that distorts perception then you should stop doing so. When all is said and done I grade with my eyes, not Calman and probes – so it’s what those eyes see, for whatever reason, that matters.

I guarantee if anyone here probes their Flanders with Lightspace and a high-end probe they will get the same report. Many of the world’s top facilities rely on Lightspace (much less often Calman)

If you do a probe on a calibrated Dolby at Company 3 you will get a virtually perfect report – not one like this.

They will ALSO perceptually look right – a properly white-balanced Alexa/Epic/F65 etc shot will show a red dress and stop sign known to be red as properly red, not kind of orange.

FSI, please respond to my London feeind’s calibration report of your new 2461, recently purchased.

BTW – here is the FSI monitor with the internal CMS turned off (i.e. the “automatic calibration feature” that lets you pick Rec 709, P3 etc.) turned off rather than set to Rec 709, as was the case in my post further above.

As you can see, it is still off, but less bad. Something is going wrong with the CMS electronics, the measuring method, or both, or something else altogether.

If anyone else has an adequate probe, a high-end profiling software (Lightspace, Cinespace, etc. – Calman I cannot comment on as to me it is more of a home-theatre application, but I could be wrong) and a recent 2461 please feel free to post your results here. I and my London friend are not making this up.

Steve Shaw, if you could please explain how these great calibration reports made with other software seem so different from those made via Lightspace – and why Lightspace seems to better align with observed color than probe reports from other software (such as Calman by F.S.I shown above – not sure what the TV station used). It would be much appreciated.

I for one am learning extremely valuable information from this thread and would like to continue doing so.

[Robert Ruffo]

I have tracked down a friend in London with a Hubble, Lightspace and a Flanders 2461.

This is his report of a 2461 – using Rec709 factory preset (he did it very carefully, and works in an extremely high end context):

As can be seen the green is over gamut, and blue is off axis.
Also, the white point is too blue, and was visibly so compared to a known reference.

The green is folding back on its self as Luma increases, as is Red to a lesser extent.

This could mean the internal calibration is controlling the peak gamut, but not the lower gamut levels.

It would seems to show that the technical level of calibration being used by Flanders is problematic.

I hope Steve can elaborate on why Lightspace can show problems that Calman does not seem to be able to, based on FSI’s reports, as this is beyond my knowledge of how Calman and other software work.

He has since recommended removal of 2461s from grading suites.

Since he has no vested interest in knocking FSI I see no reason to mistrust his findings.

[Robert Ruffo]

I am very sorry if I in any way made you feel you were doing something wrong.

I WANT to buy a Flanders, and I want to just be able to say to myself I can simply trust it and not worry. i want the Flanders to be that legendary Sony monitor from before my time.

$5000 is not a lot to pay for that kind of piece of mind. I also like to support small businesses who push the envelope like you. We are a small business, and try to do just that.

But… Steve was referring to objective measures with a probe, using Lightspace CMS – not perceptual observations.

I have met you guys at tradeshows, and I have rock-solid instincts form an entire adult life spent in show business – there is no possible way you are dishonest – and I can smell a bad vibe right away, very, very precisely. Whatever you are saying here is your direct true experience- I have zero doubt.

But I also have trouble accepting that Steve is just wrong. So I am confused. How can both realities be reconciled?

Could this be a Calman vs Lightspace issue? Does Lighstapce’s LUT algoythm maybe better emulate human vision than Calman’s and somehow account for perceptual differences rather than just observe “technical correctness”? Isn’t perceptual color what we use to make grading decisions and thus what is most important? Have you tried Lighstspace? Do you use Lightspace? What are Lighstapce’s results on your monitors?

Maybe Steve can chime in here: Let’s assume (and I think we can safely assume) that Calman report of the is true. Does your Lightspace software work differently from Calman? Can it observe things that Calman misses, or does it somehow look at displays in a different way from Calman? (Assuming both are using adequate probes).

I can tell you that I just tried growing a white box on a number of high-en plasmas – the ABL effect makes them unusable for grading – it just does. So on that you and Steve both can agree – and we can conclude that we absolutely need a Grade-01 LCD to do our work – a plasma won’t do.

Like I said, I WANT it to be yours.

It may seem like I am prodding unpleasantly, but my goal in doing so is to assuage my concerns, mine and those of others here. I want the end conclusion of this thread to be that the informed user, regardless of their budget, wants to buy FSI.

Side question: Can I send a YUV HMDI signal to your monitor vis a DV-HMI simple/cheapie adapter?

[Robert Ruffo]

FSI: Please respond to this thread re: Red gamut issue described by Steve Shaw and others, and casually observed by me, but I wasn’t sure (disclosure – why I started this doubt thread was that one reason.)

I will be blunt and say: I was going to buy an FSI 2461, and now I have decided that it is a poor idea, due only to this issue.

Projectors running in P3 space (or optimized for P3 space) are not a fair nor good reference to Rec 709 space. I often hear often how projectors are a good match – but when working in Rec 709 CRTs and Dolby monitors are the reference – and when these are compared – the Red issue comes up.

Put the 4061 next to a Dolby – the Reds are indeed orangy.

I am thinking instead of buying a Dreamcolor, keeping it is “full” gamut”, and taming it with a 3D LUt from Lightspace fed through a LUT box. Total cost of this with Lightspace and a probe is much higher than a 2461, not to mention way more work and fuss on my end, but unless I hear from you guys that the red issue is being looked at seriously – I can’t feel good about an FSI investment.

(Steve, would a Dreamcolor in Full mode (CMS bi-passed by sending a 10bit YUV HDMI signal) and a LUT box work well? Are 3D-Lut tamed Dreamcolor panels acceptable?

I need to see the color red properly, especially since we do a lot of work related to cosmetics here.

Steve Shaw works at the highest of high ends of this business – his clients include legends and household names who swear by him and his assessments – teh head of THX standards will coem out and say “you can trust Steve Shaw and Lighspace CMS” –

If Steve Shaw says FSI red gamut is off – then as far as I am concerned – it is off and there is some issue – with the panel, the backlight or the way you are interpreting probe data – I don’t know where, but somewhere. Maybe this issue is not present in 8 bit – not sure.

EIther this can be fixed by a software update that you are examining – in which case I will buy one now and wait for it to get better – or there is a hardware problem not covered by warranty – in which case I will get the Dreamcolor.

Oddly, it would seem that the lower end models you offer are MORE accurate for Rec 709. (?) as they are “redder”.

So my question to the very obviously well-meaning and honorable FSI guys is: are you looking into the red gamut issue, or not?

Anyway, in the old days, you bought a calibrated Sony CRT and you were done. This was before my time, but i’m sure many here miss the simplicity and assuredness of those days.

[Robert Ruffo]

Thanks Steve!

I will measure inaccuracy based on varying patch sizes and report back here. To keep it simple, I will use Calman (not as powerful as your software, for sure, but just to get simple delta-E reports easy to post here). If the problems are subtle, then maybe we can live with them.

[Robert Ruffo]

Thank you Steve! But have you ever seen particular models under 5K that meet this requirement in your highly numerous travels and experiments?

Also, are you saying that even plasmas like the Bt300, that claim to have a “monitor mode’ that skips ABL still have ABL?

If I am understanding correctly, if I have a 3D lut for a plasma that says “when you see a Red color of 80% brightness, shift it 3% to green (or whatever) that 3D lut would be completely thrown off by ABL, so say an 80% brightness red that fills the screen would be considered, by the LUT, to instead be a 60% Red (or whatever the ABL shifts it down to?) and thus not shifted to green, as it “should”.

That would basically mean that you cannot use 3D luts with a plasma at all as they would be utterly disjointed from the panel’s true nature. The minute a patch size changed or content represented more or less total brightness than the patch size used to make the LUT, it would render the LUT calibration 100% useless, maybe even counter-productive. Hopefully I am missing something here!

That would also mean that the very many high end suites that correct plasmas with 3D luts have been looking at wrong color all this time – which would be a bit shocking for the people who paid $500 an hour for said suites. Is this actually true?

The BT300 plasmas, apparently can be calibrated to almost perfect Rec709, as reported by independent reviews which covered gamut accuracy as well. Is this calibration false for reasons I am failing to understand? Would it suddenly be shown to be off off if say the patch sizes used by the reviewer were different?

Sorry, a lot of questions, I know, but this is all quite shocking to me, and I’m sure quite a few other son this forum (and hopefully I am overestimating the problems above)

[Robert Ruffo]

So in potential defense of FSI – were the models you tested Steve, this year’s 2461?

But… It also seems to me that ABL is a far less serious sin than incorrect reds, if I had to choose, in terms of how it might misguide a colorist. Things like image brightness are a place where at least I tend more to look at scopes than the image – but color rendition is when I am always just looking at the image, with the scopes only an afterthought.

If the ABL only comes on after all the image processing on the plasma panels – so a 3D LUTs that says a 70% bright green needs to be 10% less saturated, for example are still working as expected, even though later in the chain that 70% bright green is auto-dimmed to 50% – then we can still use 3D luts to correct panels in a box or inside DaVinci – color will be correct, and only brightness curves will be affected. (We only need to use small squares for calibration – say 30% of panel size or less)

If not then the 3D luts cannot be accurate with a plasma. Also, if not, then maybe even the internal calibration settings of the panel cannot ever be made to be correct – and would be to some degree meaningless (in terms of color, the brightness tapering off for very bright scenes I can see as not too much of a problem.

Then I have another question – Steve, with $5000 or less for a new monitor, what would you recommend, assuming a user is also empowered by your software and a reasonable probe?

[Robert Ruffo]

Thanks Margus! But this is the i1Pro 2, not the i1Display Pro.

DIfferent product!

[Robert Ruffo]

Your video was great! Thank you for your answer as well!

II will think about all this. Probably smart would be to have both a well calibrated plasma and a Flanders so that one could see how both will look – at least, that is where I am leaning.

[Robert Ruffo]

Hi Kris! I’m sure you use excellent methods for profiling your monitors. But what I would love to know (and am learning better here) is how accurate is the result, seeing the inherent limitations of any hardware technology to which even the most immaculate calibration is applied. Are we talking Delat-E of 1, 2, 3, 4, 0? You must have measured this too (the success of your careful calibration).

No display device can be perfectly calibrated by any method – it’s always a matter of degree. Sometimes that degree is beyond the limits of human vision, sometimes it is not and can lead to colorist being misled by a false representation of the image.

I would also love to understand better why, side by side, the various FSI monitors look truly different. Are the lower end monitors less precise? What is their level of accuracy vs. the flagship model?

I am learning a lot here. Thank you all for your contributions.

(And by the way, just because I see plasmas at the high end suites I happen to visit doesn’t mean I was implying that Flanders do not exists in other ones I have not happened to visit.