Robert Ruffo
Forum Replies Created
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[Bob Cole] “Hear, hear. This is especially problematic when the client is not in the suite, and views the edit on his own computer. When I deliver a .wmv file with a highly-saturated blue background, and the client says it looks “muddy” on his never-calibrated laptop, I’m at a loss. “
Why be at a loss? Just explain the problem! Or offer to calibrate his/her laptop a bit with your own kit (what we do).
BasicColor is a pretty good ICC profiler. Not for pro use really (no 3D LUTS) but very good to help clients’ home computer screens be less crazy-awful.
Clients thank us for the added bonus to their daily lives.
You just have to be respectful – clients are not colorists – you are – it’s normal that they know less than you about these things.
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does it work OK just as a Displayport convertor?
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Hi Gomar!
We have 3 screens here.
Dreamcolor
Panny Plasma
Front-Projection DLPEach reveals something unique about how out footage will be perceived under different circumstances.
Of course the Panny has floating whites, so its gamma is never to be trusted, but it can be fine in terms of color after a Lightspace 3D lut is fed to it. It’s also great for seeing focus and noise issues.
The DLP is just for previewing what material will look like projected in a cinema – its rarely on during sessions – just at the end to preview. Clients love it.
I recommend using Lightspace for calibration. All three monitors have issues visible to the eye that Calman missed in it’s way of measuring and presenting probe data, but that Lightspace saw and showed me. Trusted friends tell me that Cinepsace and Truelight are also good choices, although they too use Lightspace.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that calibration as as important as monitor choice.
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Hey Robert!
I’ve seen Flanders fall down when it comes to saturated red primaries while watching our familiar material at a friend’s studio. You just eyeball, say, lipstick (we shoot a lot of fashion, and we know what particular lipsticks should look like). Those perceptual observations matched my London friend’s findings. If you do that green gradient test, you’ll see it fall down. I do not have as keen an eye for foliage (there are not many trees where I live, which resembles a cross between Manhattan and a French small city, and I have almost never shot in nature). However, likely greens would also visibly show an issue.
I never meant to claim that Flanders were crap in general, only that they needed to fix real issues we found. I’m sure once they fix those issues their monitors will be excellent and I will be eager to buy them and recommend them to others. I’m sure they were not aware of those issues until now, otherwise they would have already fixed them.
I made an open call to all users here to measure their own or friend’s Flanders using Lightspace, Truelight or Cinespace (Calman cannot show you many problems) and post their findings (reports) here. I doubt their results will be any different, but I am 100% open to the possibility. You are welcome to do so yourself if you have access to any of these software that is able to analyze and display those aspects of probe data.
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[Robert Houllahan] “The Sony PVM-2541 is a serious contender in this price category and it’s users seem to absolutely love it. So there are certainly choices in this price range.
“When Flanders resolves their issues, and Steve and/or other proven technical experts tell us “all is well now” based on a process of thorough testing, it will be in my opinion a better monitor than the Sony Oled. The Sony suffers from real off-axis issues, much more than the Flanders which is excellent in this regard, as well as strange motion characteristics (weird way of refreshing the frame which does not resemble how your audience will look at things and is annoying in my opinion.
As far as I know The Sony is also NOT properly pre-calibrated. When the Flanders will fix/resolve any potential calibration errors in the Flanders, it will save you a lot of time and money over buying something you have to calibrate yourself.
What I’ve learned is it’s not important what other people love. For our purposes what is important is proven, thoroughly measured technical accuracy in a monitor that objectively shows us our images truthfully, warts and all, without any artifacts. You’d be surprised how few people “love” something like that, even though really they should positively adore it.
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Dear sir, you have my respect by your response. I will keep a close watch on your progress, and likely become a near future customer when the issue is resolved and/or verified as some form of anomaly with an explanation we did not expect.
I never meant to imply any animosity toward you, not between you and Steve Shaw.
All I want is a perfectly reliable monitor, and if I can get that monitor from a small business with a great attitude, then you will have my support and purchase order for sure, as well, I woudl imagine, as the support of many people reading this. Like I said, a verifiably accurate monitor, that I don;t have to fuss with calibrating myself, is in my opinion worth substantially more than $5000.
I share information not to hurt anyone. I share information because I think knowledge is empowerment for all of us.
As I have said many times, it is my firm belief, from having met you, that you have nothing but good intentions, and never meant to deliberately deceive anyone, and you last post shows this well.
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[Robert Houllahan] “I don’t think there is anything at all wrong with the FSI monitors, the questions are about profiling and calibrating them. I got the impression that FSI is trying to get the best our of their products. Remember a Dolby is about 10x the price compared to the top end FSI.
“Well if you have to profile them yourself, then a large part of what you are paying for is not there. You can profile any 10 bit LCD – and the Flanders does not have an internal way of sending your own LUT to it.
A Dreamcolor is just as good a 10 bit panel, and has internal LUTS – as do many other panels that are all way cheaper. WIth Flanders, you are supposedly paying extra for the “calibration certification” – saving you the time and expense of buying and learning software, and buying and maintaining a probe. That’s a lot of time and money. If Flanders delivered on their promise, it would actually be a really great deal.
But genuinely scientific evidence, as well as perceptual observations which concur with that evidence, show you that they do not deliver this. When I get both together, I tend to trust both.
Unfortunately Flanders has not said “We will immediately investigate this”, let alone “We will fix this” and none of their answers, which are their usual pitches about how great their probes are, along with displays of Calman charts (which cannot reveal many real potential problems) have directly addressed the issues our Lighspace examination revealed.
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Lots of people trust Flanders monitors. The question is “Why do they?” I do not know of anyone who still trusts them after having a look at their actual performance via Lighspace or Cinespace.
In most cases, they trust them because they believe that they have been “super calibrated” at the factory and because the company gives great service and is run by quite obviously great guys. They do not check this “super calibration” in a technically rigorous manner, if at all – because part of what they are paying for is the impression that they do not have to.
But technical evidence points toward Flanders monitors being highly flawed. Now these flaws will not be obvious at every turn – only when you hit those particular colors that are in the worst parts of the kinked response curves, highly saturated reds and greens being among them. Maybe your clients won’t later notice an issue, maybe they will. Maybe you will never land on a highly saturated red color in your work. But to say that you can “absolutely trust” a Flanders monitor all the time is not actually true, according to technical, measured evidence.
It might appear to be true if you test just one image – an image that does not contain the problems we discuss here – and compare it to a more high-end offering. That image, free of the “problem areas” of a Flanders monitor, will look great “compare to a Barco” etc. and thus the reports. But when you compare it using the “wrong” image – well, thus the less stellar reports also found on this thread. In that way, they do not contradict each other. Both sets of people are truthfully reporting their experiences
Flanders has not actually addressed my concerns at all. They just keep telling us how expensive their probes are, and showing us charts from software such as Calman that, while very good at the specific things they do, are also lacking in any ability to reveal many serious potential color issues. (One could say that the philosophy behind Calman predates the digital display era, when kinked gamut curves were impossible to create, even on the cheapest CRT tube, as they contained no advanced digital electronics to potentially create them, and primaries were impossible to correct for the same reason – you could only control the mix of red/green/blue not the accuracy of those colors themselves as they were color-gel hardware placed over the three tubes. If the blue tube was actually closer to teal – well, there wasn’t much you could do)
As mentioned, even million-dollar probes mean nothing if you are not applying their measurements within a good software and good CMS circuitry context. So Flanders responses are not actually responses, they are topic switches.
The sad truth is, it is my current opinion that while many of us here very much want to believe that you can buy a “true” reference monitor that is $5000 and does not require any knowledge of calibration to use, that is simply not true. You can’t have it, not yet. Many others here very deeply DO NOT want to believe that their treasured $5000 Flanders is not as reliable as they thought it was, and that to some small degree they have let their clients down. Nobody wants to believe unpleasant news. The first stage of grief is always denial. I think this is why so many here do not want to accept simple technical observations, even if they happen to match their perceptual ones.
The good news is that the second stage of grief is bargaining – and my guess is that bargaining with Flanders will be easy.
I genuinely believe that the guys at Flanders have excellent intentions, and will do everything they can to make this right. The Penta guys, I have learned, made exactly the same error until recently, also in 100% good faith – they weren’t aware they were making the mistake, because their calibration software was not up to the task of informing them. But there were frequent reports that certain colors “seemed to look wrong” to which they replied, because this is what they firmly believed at the time “That’s because you’re not used to seeing a truly calibrated monitor.” or “LCD technology inherently looks different” Sound familiar? Yes, maybe those statements are true, but they should not actually have THAT much noticeable effect.
Truth is, the only response from Flanders that would satisfy me is at this stage is “We will look into this. We will fix it.” I mean, if I can afford Lighspace or Cinespace, so can they, although maybe fully fixing the problem would require new CMS ASIC chips – not sure (hopefully not, as I wish them well and wish them easy solutions to the problem). Whatever they are using now is evidently letting them and their customers down. I doubt they’ll want to continue on that path – even though even they, for a while, will not want to accept that they have made this mistake. They are obviously good people whom I expect in no way would find it fun to realize they’ve been misleading their customers, even if it was due to a 100% honest mistake.
P.S. “Clamped vs unclamped” yes that’s what it is. But here you are seeing unclamped – revealing/proving the ability of the probe to generate smooth readings, vs badly clamped and full of kinks and errors. A well implemented CMS system, based on good probe readings interpretation and good programing of LUTS into the circuitry would clamp the colors to something aligned with Rec 709, but just as smooth. Using a very cheap probe to do the job, but still otherwise good methods, you would also get a smooth clamp, just somewhat mis-aligned from the ideal – even a cheap probe would not generate kinks like this if the rest of the process was working properly. Again, Calman can’t properly show you problems like this.
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Look again at the two charts below – top one is with Flanders CMS “off” and bottom one is with Flanders CMS “on”.
The “on” has all kinds of odd kinks in it – the off version does not – yet both were done by the same probe, on the same day.
it is my understanding that Calman misses a lot of issues in the way it looks at color – issues that have real practical implications for high-end work – it can fail to catch a lot of problems. The green gammut folding over itself is a clear example that can be missed by Calman when calibrating any monitor, not just the Flanders. Calman was designed to do 10 point grayscale calibrations for home theater – it does that very well. The other features, like gammut evaluation, are brand new, and work to a degree that has not yet been well-evaluated by anyone. People just assume they work – but I don’t know if they do or not – perhaps someone has tested them on this forum?.
it is my clear knowledge that an “inadequate probe” to the degree that anyone would call a Hubble inadequate – will make little difference – maybe a few tiny misreads here and there off by an almost or fully imperceptible amount – not this kind of kinked up mess that very coincidentally matches my eyes looking at a Flanders, and very coincidentally also matches the tell-tale signs of how a calibration using software like Calman can fail (although Steve probably knows way more about this than I do, so I hope he can chime in).
It’s not the probe that really matters, it’s the CMS circuitry to which the measurement is applied, and the software methodology used to create those measurements, and how the two work together.
A probe’s quality level, beyond a certain point, and the Hubble is well beyond that point, (you’ll see above I was questioning whether maybe even an i1Display Pro is good enough) – will only make an extremely subtle difference – and that difference will be located almost entirely in the darks. What you see above is not subtle, and is not contained only to darks. It can’t be a probe issue (if the probe was wonky, it would have delivered wonky data on both the “native” mode and the “Rec 709” mode – but only the calibrated 709 mode is squiggly – the native mode is actually in some ways better, at least, it’s perfectly linear, even though the primaries are off – in other words increasing luma arriving from the input creates smoothly increases luma being displayed without a color jump back – it doesn’t fold over itself the way the “calibrated” mode does. This folding over itself would mean that at some point, a brighter pixel in your source would be wrongly displayed as not just brighter, but another color using the Flanders “rec 709” setting).
Still don’t believe me?
Try this – make a gradient in photoshop of the pure color green – 20% luminance on the left, 100% on the right- but with hue and saturation left the same from left to right – Now look at it on your Flanders in the Rec 709 setting. Does it look right? I guarantee not. Now switch to “native” mode. See how it’s smooth with the processing turned off? (Even if the color itself is the wrong gamut, it’s now transitioning smoothly from left to right, as it should, as it is a linear gradient.)
It is possible that the Flanders is not properly calibrated due to poor software methodology used in measuring data and sending that data to the CMS. I hope that is not true, but it is looking that way.
I don’t think the Flanders guys are bad people and I’m sure they use the best probes available with superb intentions toward their customers, but until I see an evaluation done with truly high end software here (Lightspace being a good example, and I’m sure there are other examples, Calman no) I am reluctant to believe that their product can meet the very high standards I have for our gear.
Flanders probes are great – and they are great guys for sure – their software methods I have real doubts at this time.
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A cie chart is always x-y.
