Quick Look - LG 31" DCI 4K Monitor

[Phil Holland]

Good evening everybody,

A few hours ago the LG 31" DCI 4K monitor showed up here at the hut. Just wanted to share a couple of my initial thoughts as I'm about 3 hours into looking at this thing. I'll be testing this for a while, but this should help those who are looking hard at this thing a bit.


First up shipping and receiving. I ordered it from Adorama and it shipped in the box itself with rather strong support beams all around the box. However there were a couple puncture wounds on the surface that made me rather concerned. I was happy to see there was enough space and protection in the box to protect the display. Two gentlemen from UPS actually walked it up as I had some other things shipped over today as well. I felt special for a moment there

Unwrapped and box opened, here's what I found:
- 31" LG IPS DCI 4K monitor
- Stand
- Stand Base
- Power Cable
- USB 3.0 Cable
- Display Port 1.2 Cable (full to mini)
- HDMI Cable
- Manuals, CD, and all that too.
- A Color Calibration Factory Report, which was an interesting surprise and very welcomed.


Enough about that though, here's a shot from my Galaxy Note 4 of the screen powered up and displaying some DCI 4K content I shot on Mysterium-X a long while ago:





Quick thoughts on the display:

- The resolution is utterly impressive.
- The pixel pitch is incredibly fine and it's nearly impossible to see individual pixels on this screen. Even with your nose pressed against the fish tank.
- Color is very vibrant.
- The monitor has a Portrait Mode swivel, beyond that being useful in other ways, it makes getting to the cables and ports a cinch.


I had zero issues on Windows 7 using Display Port and the nVidia Titan GPU in this box. Plug and play. It detected and good to go. 60Hz 4096x2160. Easy.

I'm currently in the DCI-P3 Sim Picture Mode as that's what I'm super curious about with this display, I'm really liking how the shadows and highlights are handled on this so far. Tested out a custom calibration, sRGB, and Adobe RGB a bit too. Initial thoughts on the overall color and even factory calibration is very positive. Like it's pretty damn gorgeous really. I'm feeling safe on the investment at the moment.

I've been going through various footage finished out in DCI and UHD specifications in various codecs. I hit up YouTube and watched some of my own content as well as others. Did a big of local disk comparisons between H.264, ProRes, and some of the newer codecs. Suddenly the advantages and quality found in H.265 and VP9 at 4K are very apparent. Very interesting when it comes down to resolving fine detail, which this display uncovers in a rather ruthless way. In terms of workflow this thing is going to be a powerful quality control and review tool at a minimum. For me at the moment I'm hoping it works well for an edit and color main display as I deal with DCI 4K resolution fairly often.

I'm going through the standard viewing distances here with my funky neon green tape measure from my camera bag. My line and leaf tests. At 0.5-2.5x this display is making a tremendous difference. However, even at 3X (8-ish feet) I can see the subtle details being brought out.

You will need a decent system obviously to run various applications and even playback 4K material, and that I can see being a speed bump for some people looking at this display.

Scaling and text are initially small, but you can do things about that in the Windows Display Options. At the moment I'm leaving it small because I'm trying to see if I can work like this.

Having the extra space in software GUIs is fascinating so far and that's what I'll be dealing with for several days, but to give you an ideal of what's going on here, here's a screenshot of Redcine-X Pro and a link to a full DCI 4K version for a point of reference:

- Click for resolution 4096x2160 version


A fun personal note. For my own space at the hut I have the 70" Sharp UHD 4K display which I've been using for some time. I now have a DCI 4K display which is likely going to be my main workhorse display after I'm done testing it. Additionally even my freaking phone is sporting a 2560x1440 screen. Outside of my laptops, which I might upgrade to UHD 4K models soon, at this point I can safely say I've fully left 1080p behind, more so than even back in 2010. Just do not want. I only have two 1080p displays in this hut now and one's a 22" and the other is a 46". I'll keep those as they are good for delivery review and color, but they will mostly be on vacation.

So far, for the price I'm utterly impressed here. Just 2 and 3 years ago a display like this would have bought you a pretty decent car. The value and quality so far have impressed me. So far a thumbs up.

 

[Phil Holland]

One more quick update as I've been working in various packages and seeing what works.

Here's a screen grab from Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2014 with Dragon 5.5K 2:1 .R3Ds:




It's really interesting. In the short time I've been working/testing I'm finding that the combination of both the resolution and the aspect ratio of this display are impacting my methods pretty quickly. It's actually really nice to have way more bin space without the second monitor and utilizing the tabs, though it's something I'm getting used to. Having the larger Source and Program displays is very cool, especially when you figure they are both about 2K.


Another oddly happy accident. I have a bunch of footage I shot on Scarlet Mysterium-X at 4K FF that I never watched in 4K until now because I oddly never put it up on the big Sharp screen. Just found the exports and I'm loving those landscapes. Very pretty.

 

[Jason Kraynek]

do you normally grade in redlogfilm rather then one of the redcolor spaces?

 

[Phil Holland]

do you normally grade in redlogfilm rather then one of the redcolor spaces?

Totally depends on what I'm doing and what's needed. My personal preference tends to start with REDlogFilm for most film and commercial work. The ride film I shot two months ago delivered REDgamma4 however and was pretty straight forward for a VFX heavy and rec.709 delivery. With Dragon I've been pretty true to using DRAGONcolor as my color space like 99% of the time.

I have a great deal of LUTs I've created that are based on log and that also plays a role here. Mostly work in DaVinci Resolve and Adobe SpeedGrade these days as well as Redcine-X Pro. Commonly I'm working out a quick 1st light in RCX and working from there, though sometimes it's more about being in log and jumping into grading package and developing my color corrections and color grades.

Just depends.

 

[Jason Kraynek]

thanks man. yea, currently im trying to get better in cinex as ive been learning Resolve over the past 2 years and now i feel that i need to learn something that will let me output 4k if i want it. I just remember initially opening speedgrade and having FCPX v1 flashbacks and quickly turned it off- havent checked it out since. Just found out the Resolve doesnt carry over a few things from cine-x as well which is kinda disappointing but understandable i suppose.

have been wanting to play in a straight film log starting point, if anyone- your the one to ask so thanks again. Been learning this whole workflow from scratch and i know i can get better images out of the camera- just need to learn the correct workflow.

 

[L. Langer]

This is good. I would love to see a 5K version of this monitor down the line.

 

[Scott Pultz]

Thank you for the impressions! Does the display have a screen coating or is it glossy? If it has a coating, how grainy is it? I prefer glossy in a light controlled room but those are becoming difficult to come by.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Just checking…

Just checking…

(snip) I had zero issues on Windows 7 using Display Port and the nVidia Titan GPU in this box. Plug and play. It detected and good to go. 60Hz 4096x2160. Easy.

You were able to run 4096 x 2160 at 60Hz over a single DP 1.2 cable? If so, please confirm - I didn't think there was enough bandwidth, but I'd love to be wrong ;-)

Cheers - #19

 

[Scott Pultz]

You don't by chance have a Surface Pro 3 that you could try this with do you? Curious if that can push the resolution or if it is limited to 3840.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

You were able to run 4096 x 2160 at 60Hz over a single DP 1.2 cable? If so, please confirm - I didn't think there was enough bandwidth, but I'd love to be wrong ;-)

Cheers - #19

You can at 8bit. It also depends on your GPU. Many GPUs are limited to 50Hz at 4096x2160. Like the Macbook Pro...

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Thanx for the clarification Jeff. Assuming Phil wants to use the panel for grading he's really going to want 10 bits which I assume is possible by reducing the refresh rate to 30Hz. If so, is there a simple way to toggle between the 60Hz/8 bit mode for GUI/editorial and a 30Hz/10bit mode for grading?

While we're on the subject; in terms of display driving (not compute capacity) is there any difference between the GTX 970 4GB, GTX 980 4GB and the Titan Black 4GB (or even 6GB)? I ask in part because the 980GTXs w/4GB are roughly $550 and the 970GTXs w/4GB around $350. Just curious what that extra $200 gets me in terms of compute power applicable to what we do. For reference I don't spend a lot of time in Resolve (if I did I'd just go Titan) and I have an RR-X so GPU decoding of R3Ds is not critical for me.

Cheers - #19

 

[Phil Holland]

You were able to run 4096 x 2160 at 60Hz over a single DP 1.2 cable? If so, please confirm - I didn't think there was enough bandwidth, but I'd love to be wrong ;-)

Cheers - #19

I can 100% confirm I am achieving 4096x2160 at 60Hz over DP 1.2. It's in the Display Port documentation that it can support this high resolution and bit depth, so it's not really a shocker for me.

Thank you for the impressions! Does the display have a screen coating or is it glossy? If it has a coating, how grainy is it? I prefer glossy in a light controlled room but those are becoming difficult to come by.

The screen has a matte finish with a small bit of gloss to it. I don't see any grain or pebbling on the surface. I had a good sneeze this morning and did clean off the screen with some Kimwipes and glass cleaner. It's a very clean and crisp picture really without anything getting in the way of that. It is prone to glare like all screens, so take the usual precautions on that front. You don't want a big daylight window behind you obviously.

The viewing angle is very good on this screen. Holds color and intensity at fairly extreme angles.

You don't by chance have a Surface Pro 3 that you could try this with do you? Curious if that can push the resolution or if it is limited to 3840.

Nope. Santa didn't bring a Surface Pro 3 into my life a bit ago, though I looked at one pretty hard for a while. I'll see if anybody I know has one I can snag though.


An additional note here. This LG display has a full VESA mount on the rear. That combined with the USB 3.0 ports and the display itself being essentially a USB 3.0 hub I can see this gaining a lot of interest for on set and DIT use.

I'm building up and attaching the rest of my devices today. Right now I'm doing some work screen right and have some Adobe Media Encoder exports running screen left. As I mentioned above I'm attempting to adapt and use this screen without utilizing Windows scaling to increase the font and icons. Though I find in Google Chrome I've enlarged the text to make that a bit easier. At this point outside of testing I've had a few hours of actual work and one thing I'm already experiencing as a positive is the extra screen space. It's 4X what I was working with before and I'm using it exactly that way at the moment.

Because this display can work well with the optimal viewing distances found in theaters and ideal for larger home displays I have about two dozen 30 second clips queued up to test various finishing methods for a DCI 4K finish. Similar to what I did for "Alan Turning Wood" and I've already watched those tests. Combined with the favorable response by a client and my experience on that I'm experimenting a bit deeper on ways of finishing for true 4K. This should be fascinating and it's going to influence my next few shoots because they are all targeted for a 4K DCI finish. The next one is a 6K FF project and I'm hoping to push the boundaries.





I do have some fun 4K material here I'm reviewing. For instance a 10-bit 4K DCI Gone Girl trailer as well as a few 4K DCI clips from Interstellar. I'm going back and watching tons and tons of footage too. It's certainly giving me some interesting thoughts on finishing, grain/texture/noise, and sharpness. That's where so much of the chatter is these days, but it makes me wonder if there's ever going to be a proper answer between "glass clean" and "textured". And what's too sharp? What's too soft? What is 4K exactly? What I do know is if you look at that orange and rocky landscape top frame center there's so much amazing detail in 4K that it brings you right into that environment and that world. It's making me respect the efforts by the Gone Girl team more for their glass, shooting methods, and finish for sure.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

I can 100% confirm I am achieving 4096x2160 at 60Hz over DP 1.2. It's in the Display Port documentation that it can support this high resolution and bit depth, so it's not really a shocker for me. (snip)

Confirmed at 10 bits? Jeff's note was that 4096/60 over a single DP1.2 pipe was limited to 8 bits. FWIW, I'd be fine with 8 bits @ 60Hz as long as I can toggle easily to 10bits @24 or 30Hz for color work.

Cheers - #19

 

[Phil Holland]

Confirmed at 10 bits? Jeff's note was that 4096/60 over a single DP1.2 pipe was limited to 8 bits. FWIW, I'd be fine with 8 bits @ 60Hz as long as I can toggle easily to 10bits @24 or 30Hz for color work.

Cheers - #19

I'm running 8-bit as Jeff mentioned at the moment.

 

[Eric Santiago]

Curios to see this off a nMP

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

I'm running 8-bit as Jeff mentioned at the moment.

In Windows 7 are you able to create two presets for that monitor, one at 60P/8 bit and one at 30P/10 bit, and toggle between them? I ask as that seems like a way that one could have a refresh rate appropriate to a GUI screen, perhaps even sharp enough to make text scaling in menus unimportant - AND - in the very same monitor, have the ability to go full screen with your video clip, toggle to 30P/10bit and start grading. If such dual use is viable, and the panel performs well, it sure seems like a great deal for roughly $1,500.

Cheers - #19

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Windos GUI is still only 8bit. 10bit support has to be app/GPU specific.

I think the best hope for this display as a 10bit grading monitor is through BMD's products with Thunderbolt/DisplayPort connectivity. But some Windows applications and GUI combinations can drive 10bit over DP. Scratch can do it, as an example, with a supported GPU. The AJA IO4K or BMD DeckLink 4K can drive 4K DCI 10bit at 24 (and I think 25) fps via HDMI 1.4. IO4K supports HDMI 2.0, but I'm not sure if it can handle full 18Gbps bandwidth. Not that this display can either...

 

[Kirk.Attard]

So Phil. You are using this as your main GUI monitor and lastly as a viewing monitor, finishing color on another screen. I think it makes a lot of sense. Do you think that other programs like Maya and Nuke will have issues to run this or will they just scale accordingly. So happy things are working well out of the box at last.

 

[Brett Harrison]

Phil, thanks very much for the review. I'd like to ask if you have a calibration system like LightSpace that will give you a measurement of the accuracy of the P3 space.

 

[Dimitri Boschma]

Thanks for the insights on this monitor, especially the screenshots. gives a good idea of the amoutn of real estate on this puppy.
I'll think this will be my new monitor instead of my dual apple cinema 30"....