Alternative To Apple Hd Monitor
 

If you wanted a HD monitor (16 by 9)
and you needed to use it for hooking it up to your G4 laptop
as well as on location monitor viewing of shots set up...

what would you get?


TPM

I heard good things about the WM-3001 field monitor:

http://www.astro-systems.com/

Not sure what you're really looking for here... the Apple 23" Cinema Display isn't really an "HD monitor", it's a computer screen and will only work with ADC input.

I've looked around a bit for this sort of thing myself, and am not so sure that you can really kill two birds with one stone like this. A couple years ago I got a Samsung SyncMaster 151MP which is 1024x768 VGA monitor that also accepts s-video, RCA and component. It has a tv tuner module as well. It works fine as a computer display, but looks horrible when used as a video monitor with s-video. Maybe there are some newer models that work better these days? I think one of the problems is that the pixel dimensions of the screen (1024x768) don't scale well to a 720x480 video signal.

Now recently I've been considering the Sony WEGA KLV-23HR1 which is a 16:9 native 1280x768 23" screen. It looks nice in the store (but doesn't everything? ;-) One day I'll take my PDX-10 by and see how some playback looks on it. The price has dropped recently on this model to around $2,200 I think. However you won't be able to use this as a computer monitor, just s-video, RCA and component.

I'm very much satisfied with my recently purchased Viewsonic VP171b. It's advertised as being able to handle 720p and since it's resolution is 1280 x 1024, it's able to do this without scaling. I have it connected via DVI (it has VGA as well) to an MIT MyHD MDP-120 hi-def card. This setup accepts the signal via Firewire from either my HD1 or my DVHS DH30000.
The picture quality is outstanding and coming from the HD1 via Firewire seems to confirm my suspicion that the HD1's edge-enhancement is not part of the recorded signal but is only applied to the analog output during playback.

I'm using the 15 inch Samsung HD LCD as a computer monitor/HDTV monitor. It's not the greatest for the HDTV (it's an LCD), but I'll be getting a CRT one by next year. Time to make some money first!

heath

Well after thinking about all this I was in Circuit City today, and on an impulse ended up buying a Sony SDM-V72W Multimedia Display (they have a 14 day full refund return policy). This is a 17.1" 16:9 TFT active matrix LCD screen with 1280x768 resolution and a 500:1 contrast ratio. It accepts s-video, component video and VGA. I haven't really put it through its paces, but it looks like a very nice, bright, lightweight screen that I can haul around.

The price seemed pretty good to me, it was $900 with a $200 Sony rebate, for a total of $700. Now I'm not using this for HD personally, but with a Sony PDX-10 DVCAM in 16:9 mode, and the image looks pretty good. There was a noticeable amount of grainy noise on the s-video image using the factory default settings, but turning the sharpness down to 0 eliminated most of it. Quickly looking at a test pattern, in s-video mode the screen overscans by about 3% or so, which is comparable to the LCD screen on my PDX-10.

Anyway, this might be an option worth investigating for your needs since it supports multiple input formats.