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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Reference Monitors

ALL LCDs suffer off-angle distortion, and Dreamcolor is not worse than Flanders or any other brand. Oleds are very, very bad for this.

Plasmas have other problems, like massive stepping in dark gradients, non-linear color and white pumping.

My Dreamcolor is not "ballpark" it has been calibrated to 99.2% of exactly perfect Rec 709 according to a Klein probe. It's all about calibration. If the studio where you went did not calibrate their monitor that's their problem. Only Flanders come pre-calibarted out of the box. Everything else is shipped way, way off and you have to calibrate it yourself and most often use a 3D LUT.

Tom, displays are not really subjective in terms of their accuracy. Some are accurate and some are not, some can be calibrated easily and some cannot. These are hard, objective facts.
Hey Robert, how is your Dreamcolor hooked up, is it via an HDLink?
 
Tom, displays are not really subjective in terms of their accuracy. Some are accurate and some are not, some can be calibrated easily and some cannot. These are hard, objective facts.
And yet it's interesting to note, if you take 10 displays that are calibrated, and put them all in a row... they're gonna look different. Even worse with different size monitors, different backlight technologies, LED vs. plasma vs. OLED vs. projection... this is a moving target. Not as cold and hard as you might think. There's a wider degree of judgement calls than you might think; for example, I can recall a time when a major-player LA post house had different calibration standards at their Hollywood division than their Burbank division, and there were frequent fights as to which interpretation of the results was correct.

The Dolby 4220 LCD monitor is one example of a monitor that does look good from a fairly wide viewing angle. But I don't think this will answer the O.P.'s question, which is really "how can I get an inexpensive monitor that works for color mastering?" I think we'll agree on that answer.
 
Marc,

Thanks for the input - and yes basically thats what I was ask, a Calibrated monitor for mastering color who's entire production budget aren't in the six figure range but wants to know that a least from the edit bay the colors he graded are accurate. I also realize the timing of my question was miscalculated as NAB starts Monday in ernest and at every NAB the chances of the game changing could happen.

Thanks

Tom
 
Thanks for the input - and yes basically thats what I was ask, a Calibrated monitor for mastering color who's entire production budget aren't in the six figure range but wants to know that a least from the edit bay the colors he graded are accurate. I also realize the timing of my question was miscalculated as NAB starts Monday in ernest and at every NAB the chances of the game changing could happen.
And to tell you the truth, there will be some real bargains unveiled on the show floor. I would say you'll have twice as many choices available by the end of the week. In a lot of ways, this is good news for everybody: as far as I'm concerned, it's good when clients, users, production companies, DITs, DPs, and post people all have lower-cost, accurate tools that still deliver reasonable performance.
 
And yet it's interesting to note, if you take 10 displays that are calibrated, and put them all in a row... they're gonna look different. Even worse with different size monitors, different backlight technologies, LED vs. plasma vs. OLED vs. projection... this is a moving target. Not as cold and hard as you might think. There's a wider degree of judgement calls than you might think; for example, I can recall a time when a major-player LA post house had different calibration standards at their Hollywood division than their Burbank division, and there were frequent fights as to which interpretation of the results was correct.

The Dolby 4220 LCD monitor is one example of a monitor that does look good from a fairly wide viewing angle. But I don't think this will answer the O.P.'s question, which is really "how can I get an inexpensive monitor that works for color mastering?" I think we'll agree on that answer.

Some of it can be subjective - sure - like LCD vs plasma, but some is objective and verifiable. Our suite has a plasma, an LCD and a projector. they all look IDENTICAL they only "feel" different, and the plasma has the deepest blacks, but basically, they look exactly the same in terms of gamut and gamma.
 
Ok, with out sounded totally "new" is that the point of calibrated scopes/waveforms mathematically speaking what you see as black is black if the scope says its black and so forth? I get that each monitor may display slightly or even very differently....
 
Some of it can be subjective - sure - like LCD vs plasma, but some is objective and verifiable. Our suite has a plasma, an LCD and a projector. they all look IDENTICAL they only "feel" different, and the plasma has the deepest blacks, but basically, they look exactly the same in terms of gamut and gamma.
Funny... at Technicolor, I'd sometimes see three monitors in the same room, and everybody there went nuts because they all looked different, simply because of size. And the engineers would verify that they "measured" exactly identically. Feel is everything when it comes to color, because (at least in my opinion) so much of it boils down to guts and emotion.

BTW, I just saw the new Dreamcolor Z24X today at NAB and thought it was not bad, especially for $600. I'm not sure how well it can calibrate, but it looked OK to me. I'm pretty surprised that HP could basically knock $1000 off the price of the Dreamcolor in a 2nd-generation product:

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-news/pr...Color-Accuracy-and-Affordability#.U0PLNl64n8s

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/pdf/z24x_display_quickspecs_tcm_245_1618841.pdf
 
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