4K Monitors... urgent.

[Dominick Pietrzak]

Hey Jannard. This might not be related to the thread but it is related to 4K. I went in for the REDucation Open House in NY today, and I was absolutely blown away by the reel you guys showed. It looked absolutely fantastic and breathtaking. The short films were excellent as well and it was great to see them projected in 4K.

Thanks for all your hard work and I can't wait for Dragon... although I'm not sure how it can get better than what I saw today.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Apparently 4K panels are now showing up in stores (a great thing) and showing footage (another great thing)... but there is one big problem. The default setting from just about every manufacturer has Sharpness turned ON. This is a really bad thing.

I think the other bad things, like their relative color temperature, grey scale balance, color accuracy, and 8-bit video are also major issues. Some of these, you can adjust and compensate for, to a point.

No consumer sets I've ever seen come out of the box looking good. They all need a lot of help just to get in the ballpark.

 

[Jeremy Torrie]

There are LG UltraHD panels at La Marche du Film...but nothing on them!

 

[Mark Toia]

I think because they are playing HD content on it and wanting it to look sharper and cleaner than the HD TV sitting next to it with the same feed.
And with a drastic shortage of 4k content and 4k players.. I don't think you will get your wish for some time Jim.

 

[Adam Johnson]

Agreed

I think because they are playing HD content on it and wanting it to look sharper and cleaner than the HD TV sitting next to it with the same feed.
And with a drastic shortage of 4k content and 4k players.. I don't think you will get your wish for some time Jim.

 

[Bing Bailey]

these panels should not be 8bit. rec2020 is the mandated colour space for uhd and its a min of 10bit 4:2:2 - strangely nobody is talking about that mandate. I hope these early tvs won't be useless like the pretend hd ready ones were

 

[Stephen Gentle]

Manufacturers really need to ship sets calibrated properly. The MOST offensive is that bullshit Motionflow 120Hz and 240Hz stuff. It makes nice looking 24P material look like a soap opera. Jim I know you;re an advocate for HFR but I think we can all agree that a filmmaker's work should be displayed at the intended frame rate. Sony sets ship with that crap turned on and it's incredibly disgusting and offensive to our craft. It needs to be stopped.

I agree - there was so much rubbish I had to turn off to get my TV to look good - dynamic contrast, motion gamma, ClearMotion, etc.

And the worst bit was that once you fix it in TV mode, you have to turn them off for each input individually, and then the Blu-Ray player had something called BD-Sense or something like that where it changes back all the TV's settings to their "optimal" values (ie. the crap initial setup).

I get that they want to be able to advertise bigger numbers and more features than the others, but it's kind of stupid when they all make the image a lot worse...

 

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

I can't believe how many people I know have there TV's set to 120 hertz, it totally destroys the look of films. When I ask them about it, many don't even notices it. Drives me insane.

And while we're there, we should have them turn off the 120hz "true motion" or whatever it's called. Ack.

Manufacturers really need to ship sets calibrated properly. The MOST offensive is that bullshit Motionflow 120Hz and 240Hz stuff. It makes nice looking 24P material look like a soap opera. Jim I know you;re an advocate for HFR but I think we can all agree that a filmmaker's work should be displayed at the intended frame rate. Sony sets ship with that crap turned on and it's incredibly disgusting and offensive to our craft. It needs to be stopped.

+1000

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

120 Hz and higher are useful for UI.

 

[Glen Powell]

Ugh - Out last weekend with my wife and mother in law (that's a whole story in of itself) and we ended up in a big box electronic store so MIL could buy a new headset.

As we were standing there, my wife leans in and starts railing about how bad the wall of TV's looks; every one of them had sharpening on, the colour varied from bad to worse, and they all had the aspect ratio screwed up. I mean the picture was stretched or zoomed, because the stores satellite feed wasn't actually HD, but SD that they tried to fill the screen with. On the sports channels this meant that the score tickers at the top and bottom were partially or totally cut off. Horrible!!

When my MIL was finished speaking to the sales person, she turned to us and commented how great the TV's looked. How the colour was fantastic, and the picture so clear… Mon dieu!

Better yet, this was a store that is owned by one of the largest Canadian telecom companies, who also owns (and is trying to sell the services of in this store) the largest Canadian provider of Satellite TV and Fibre based IPTV...

If retailers and manufacturers still can't get HDTV's set-up properly, how can we expect them to do justice to 4K?

 

[Bob Gundu]

I hope Sony is at least setting up their monitors properly in their stores??? Big box outlets never get it right because no one cares and most are just looking at the price.

 

[Antoine Fabi]

Will do so.

Thanks!

 

[Elsie N]

Apparently 4K panels are now showing up in stores (a great thing) and showing footage (another great thing)... but there is one big problem. The default setting from just about every manufacturer has Sharpness turned ON. This is a really bad thing.

We have quite a number of panels here at RSH and the very 1st thing we do is turn sharpening OFF. It just dawned on us that stores might not think about that. Please tell them when you see them.

Better yet... encourage the manufactures to set default Sharpness to OFF. Sharpening turns chocolate into sand. With real 4K... you have enough resolution. It doesn't need help.

Jim

It would be a good thing if an influential blogger started a blog dealing with just such things as addressing the best setups for all 4k panels. A good blogger can influence exponentially since readers pass on the link or the info to others. RED could help by taking out a banner ad on the site.

 

[Steve Sherrick]

Jim, wonder if there is a way for you to partner with some of the big box stores (Best Buy) with a RED certified 4K campaign. You would provide a 4k demo reel, Red Ray player(store would purchase), and they could have people trained on how to get it all set up properly. Red gets some nice advertising out of it, including Odemax and the stores have jawdropping quality that even a casual observer might be blown away by and perhaps 4K starts selling even faster. Good for you guys and good for these stores that have no clue how to show quality of TVs.

 

[AndreasOberg]

If retailers and manufacturers still can't get HDTV's set-up properly, how can we expect them to do justice to 4K?

I completely agree. In my experience it's very rare that the tvs are even remotly setup correctly.
The last sales person I talked to told me that it was better to watch DVD footage at 52" plasma screens.... so...
So yes, to really show to people the quality of 4k or even hd it woudl be good to have it setup correctly at least some places.
/Andreas

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

It would be a good thing if an influential blogger started a blog dealing with just such things as addressing the best setups for all 4k panels. A good blogger can influence exponentially since readers pass on the link or the info to others. RED could help by taking out a banner ad on the site.

"Best" is a relative term, but in the context of this thread - where applicable:

Video NR: OFF
Mosquito NR: OFF
Motion interpolation: OFF
Dynamic contrast: OFF
Overscan: OFF
Color enhancing: OFF
Color tone: NEUTRAL

That's mostly it for general settings, with the same principle of disabling manufacturer added picture enhancements/alterations targeted for an average consumer, and it is unrelated to the resolution of the panel.
Color and gamma accuracy require separate measuring and calibration per each panel.

 

[Elsie N]

Jim, wonder if there is a way for you to partner with some of the big box stores (Best Buy) with a RED certified 4K campaign. You would provide a 4k demo reel, Red Ray player(store would purchase), and they could have people trained on how to get it all set up properly. Red gets some nice advertising out of it, including Odemax and the stores have jawdropping quality that even a casual observer might be blown away by and perhaps 4K starts selling even faster. Good for you guys and good for these stores that have no clue how to show quality of TVs.

Steve, just to add to your idea, maybe some entity (RED?) could do a "how to" demo to accompany each new TV sold showing how to set up the panel for 4k. It would be time consuming to make one for each brand and model but in the end it would cause 4k to gain acceptance much faster. RED could do this but since SONY or others sell panels themselves they would not do a brand by brand demo. RED would gain exposure to the public and their brand would become synonymous with 4K.

 

[Karl H]

I think it's more urgent they turn off motion flow technology, smoothscan, moreframesforyourmoney, or whatever the manufacturer chooses to call it.

*vomits*

You'll never stop in store TV's from looking shit, their sole aim is to burn out your retinas as you walk past.

 

[Corey_O]

I believe 4k is going to be in the home faster than people think. Redray upscales very nice. Thanks Jim.
Just growing pains.

 

[Les Dittert]

Here is the dilemma we face with TV settings :

Imagine if the TV set had the remote available on the showroom floor. So the average customer walking by could set the sharpness,dynamic color, etc to their liking for best picture.
Where do you think those settings would fall ?

My guess is they would have the sharpness turned up, vivid color , and all the other 'candy coated' looks turned on.
Joe Sixpack likes that.
You can do all the THX SMPTE accurate settings you want, these guys would think it looks lousy.
Oh well.