So I plugged my HD-100 in to my new HD 32" LCD TV

[Carlos E. Martinez]

Originally Posted by Mark Silva

Ah, I understand.

I had not heard of that issue before. Was it with the 24" model?

I have heard nothing but praise from anyone owning the 24" model.

We've had ours a year now and its still perfect, with no hot pixels.

Yes, it was the 2405FPW model.

In any case, I have been doing a research on LCD monitors that might be on the same league as the 2405 or close by in size.

There seem to be three (that I could find):

- Gateway FPD2485W
- Benk FP241W
- HP Flat Panel Monitor L2335

The Gateway seems to be the most promising of them all. Those that compared it with the 2405 thought the Gateway was much better, side by side. Maybe because of the pixel response, which is half the Dell's.

Pixel pitch is not specified for the Dell, but should be .27mm as on the other 24".

[Chris Barcellos]

Okay, this is probably JVC territory, but I think the LCD issue is universal. I am shooting FX1.

My first LCD is a 21 inch Dell 1620x1040 (or something) monitor with DVI, S video, composite and SVga input. I thought it was doing a pretty good job of display my FX1 HDV footage through the computer system media players. But there always seemed to be background "noise". (Actually if you put you nose up on the screen it looks like a bit of grainy film overlaying the video.)

Next, I wanted to actually look at HDV over air broadcast, so I bought a cheap 32" Magnovox LCD at Best Buy. I figured I would also test footage from the camera on the component input. It has the HDV tuner, HDMI input, along with the component input. I hooked it up as a secondary monitor on my editing system using a DVI to HDMI converter cable. As with the Dell, use as a computer monitor is not that impressive. I tweaked setting, but may need more background on that. I get just decent rendition of the footage through media players.

What I have impressed with for my $700 Magnovox purchase is the broadcast quality, as well as the quality of direct from my cameras component output (BNC ??) cable. I have produced short HDV projects, loaded them back to tape, and ended up with a very nice picture. Too bad the editing systems with HDV don't have the firewire monitoring capabilities that they do with DV.....

[Paolo Ciccone]

Since every LCD display is basically a matrix of discreet pixels the results will depend on the need for the display to upsize the image in order to make it fit its native resolution. This leads to an interesting fact. If you buy an HD TV and use it to watch SD footage, a very common scenario right now, a 720p TV will deliver a better image than an 1080i or 1080p. NTSC TV is converted to digital at 480 lines. A 720p display will have a lower upsizing factor than the 1080p. At 1080 you are upscaling more than 200% the original size. If you have done any work with Photoshop you know that that is no a good idea. This is, BTW, the reason why rear projection TVs, even the ones enabled for HD, deliver a much sharper image of SD signal even when the image is projected on a 50" screen. It's the same principle that allows us to see a 35mm frame on a 40 foot screen with clarity.

If you want to use a TV to watch HD100 footage be sure that you either use a display with native resolution of 720p or that you can configure the TV to go "pixel-by-pixel" without upsampling. This will show an image that is smaller than the physical display but it will look much nicer.

[Bill Ravens]

But, if you upsize for the number of pixels, then downrez for screen size, don't you essentially end up with the same image?

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Bill Ravens

But, if you upsize for the number of pixels, then downrez for screen size, don't you essentially end up with the same image?

Not sure I understand what you mean but basically, NO. If you upres and image you end up with a corrupted image. The only way to upsize a digital, pixel based, image is to repeat pixels based on a more or less intellignt algorythm. IN the simples case the software calculates the ratio of expansion, let's say 4 times (NTSC to 1080) and then will repeat the pixels based on that ratio. So if your original pixels were:

xy

they then becomes:

xxxxyyyy
xxxxyyyy
xxxxyyyy
xxxxyyyy

Not a pretty picture, visually and figuratively. If you then downsize that you end up with a crushed image obtained from a degraded source.
Nope. When you deal with digital you have pixel-by-pixel or crap. We just bought a professional monitor for checking the output from the cameras for "El Papel" and the monitor has a special feature called pixel-by-pixel. Because that's the only way to ensure that what you watch is the real deal.
When seeing a 720p picture in pbp mode on a 1080 monitor the picture will take just a portion of the display. It's a 1-by-1 relationship. The display of the monitor is a grid. There is no "pixel stretcher" :)

[Werner Wesp]

But all that shouldn't be a problem since the resolution of his LCD. 1280x720 should be displayed in it's native size to fill the screen (The few pixels overshoot will be for a black border in the overscan, I'm guessing)

On the other hand, I have less trouble believing the 1080i footage of the sony FX1 (and the Z1) looks not quite as good for 3 reasons: 1) The resolution doesn't match 2) the width needs to be stretched from 1440 to 1920 pixels (and after that downscaled to 1280 or 1366), but most importantly 3) it's interlaced footage and LCD's are progressive by nature. Deïnterlacing shakes off a whole lot of the original quality...