Thursday, December 02, 2004

Sony is going to discontinue CRT monitors! - an equipment dealer friend told me yesterday and I have to say I mightily suprised. We've been trying to get LMD panels into traditional broadcast facilities for the last half year with mixed success. Although the colour in now pretty much there (only a little bit of work required to get it looking like illuminant-D) the blacks were still an issue but now Sony have released the "super-black" version of all of their TFTs I think it is now all good. It'll take a bit of work convincing the more traditionally minded folks in TV (telecine colourists, racks engineers etc.) not to stare at a Trinitron all day but it's definately the way forward.
I remembered when I was working in the maintenance workshop in BBC News in the late eighties - we were just starting to look at CCD-based cameras and although all the "gurus" were banging on about how they'd never catch on and never match the look of a tube'd camera the maintenance manager told me he couldn't wait for solid state monitors . I thought at the time it was a vain hope, but the promise of less-frequent line-up, more stable colourimetry, no 27Kv danger during maintenance, 5Kg monitors, true 2k resolution for a quarter of the price of the £24k BVM-HD models etc. etc is a great one.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yep - I see the draw of flat panel, solid state displays, and they seem to have really taken off in non-linear editing applications. Haven't seen an Avid or a QEdit with a primary CRT display for ages.

However until we move to a progressive production system I think that having a native interlaced monitor is still pretty important - otherwise you aren't really seeing what you are doing - just a de-interlaced version? (If you are working with video rather than film)