When was the last time you saw a large screen, 1080 line, direct view CRT display?  If you work in the video or cinema production, post-production or broadcast industries, it might have been just before your coffee break.   For years, CRTs have been the gold standard of image quality and have been used to produce the HDTV signals the rest of us see on LCD, plasma or DLP sets.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

I attended the standing-room only SMPTE-NY section meeting on January 17th titled “Flat Panel LCD Reference Monitor Technology.”  There were six companies demonstrating their 23″ or 24″ 1080p LCD studio reference monitors:  Vutrix, JVC Professional Products Company, TV Logic, Tamuz, Cine-tal and Teranex Inc.   Sony provided a SRW-5500 HDTV Digital VCR and CRT reference monitor that drove all monitors with the same HD-SDI signal through an nVision HD router.   Goldcrest Post had specially prepared a test tape for the meeting, which included both film and digitally originated material plus reference test signals.  This setup provided an identical and essentially perfect video signal to each monitor: any differences seen on the screens were the monitor’s fault, not the video feed.

A straw poll was taken in the audience of over 100 and only about 1/3 had used LCD monitors as reference monitors in their work.  The remainder had only used CRT monitors.  This topic is an important one to the SMPTE audience because the high-quality CRT monitors needed for reference use are becoming less available and are expected to vanish entirely in the near future.  At that point, it is expected that all studio reference monitors will be LCDs.

In truth, it is not just the shortage of CRTs driving the market: to my eye all 6 of the LCD displays looked better than the Sony CRT monitor.  Certainly all were much more compact and the prices were lower.  However, as Tom O’Neill of Cine-Tal pointed out, only the studio monitor users in the room could really say if the image quality of an LCD monitor was good enough to replace CRTs.

The broadcast monitor market is too small to support a dedicated LCD panel design so all 6 monitors used 1920 x 1200 panels from either Samsung (24″ with panels second-sourced from CMO) or LG.Philips (23″ with panels second sourced from AUO).  The desire was to have no scaling for the video so all manufacturers used only a 1920 x 1080 subset of the panel.  While most of the manufacturers left the extra lines unused, the JVC monitor used them to display ancillary data such as audio levels, signal type, signal source and time code.

As expected in a studio monitor, all six monitors could be calibrated with an external calibration probe for a specific color gamut, gamma response curve and white point.  All monitors could accept a variety of input signals, including HD-SDI and other digital and analog formats.  These monitors could accept 1080i, 1080p and 720p inputs as well as standard definition.  Most could display 720p with direct pixel mapping to avoid scaling artifacts in the displayed image.  Since LCD monitors are fundamentally progressive, they all had interlace to progressive algorithms built in.

Ray Kalo of Tamuz said his company had been the first to introduce LCD monitors to the broadcast industry: small triple mount monitors in 1996 used for little more than checking the presence of a signal.  While he didn’t want to formally announce anything, he said to look for something big from Tamuz (i.e. 57″) at NAB, April 14-19, 2007.  For those of us freshly back from CES, these sorts of displays almost make another trip to Vegas appealing.

A complete report on this SMPTE-NY section meeting and studio monitors will be published in the February issue of Projection Monthly with Flat Panel Coverage.