Marshall LCD70P v Ikan VX9 v SmallHD

[Greg Kiger]

I am new to the game so maybe my opinion isn't worth much here but I have the Marshall 70p (which I like) but I have to agree with Andrew Dean in that to me resolution trumps features. Yes I have false colors and peaking but would trade that for higher resolution any day.

[Andrew Dean]

I just chucked my dp1 on my wife's kitchen scale and it showed up as 777 grams, including the battery brackets, but without a battery.

I've always been curious about the carrion. The signal to noise about it was low, given the complains about siniarch and his "speedy" support. I've never seen one in person so i cant compare them. The monitors i've done side by side comparisons to the dp1, the smallHD looked like a crisp window... so the carrion being that much better sounds pretty nice.

I've never had a strobing issue with the dp1, and I often use it under LED lighting. I've had waves in the image when shooting 1/60th on a 7d, but thats a hz/lighting refresh issue. The waves shown in the monitor in that case were actually seen by the camera.

I agree that a monitor side by side would rock. Wonder if that'll ever happen.

cheers!

[Dale Guthormsen]

Good evening,

what is a pag carion??


I use the DP1 on the tripod and was interested in using it on the shoulder.

How do you guys use it that way?


Does anyone use it on a steadicam mountee up high instead at the feet??

Dale

[Paul Cook]

Hey thanks Andrew - so if 770 is correct that's actually a bit lighter than my Marshall - by about 100 grams or so - but with 2" of extra screen and lots more pixels...hmmmm

I really need to get me one to do a side by side...

[Andrew Dean]

Originally Posted by Dale Guthormsen

Good evening,

what is a pag carion??

I don't think thats anything. Pag is a company that mostly makes camera batteries and lights, but also ventured into some "questionable" shoulder rigs. One of those is the pag "orbiter" which i bought. I found it useless for a large camera like the fx1, but have revisited it for the 7d. I've removed the straps and support rod and was playing with cranking enough counterweights on the back to make it sorta balance. (its not an advisable path, given its out of the scope of design for the orbiter, but i'm having fun playing and its actually kinda working with 2 7ah lead acid batts + 2 tekkeon double packs on the back.

The Carrion is a HD monitor that was similar to manhattanlcd, but used a very expensive (and reportedly nice) controller board, cost $1600+ and weighed a lot. Some people reported the image as great, some as not-so-great and everyone universally reported siniarch as slow to respond. It took him as much as 6 months to build one once you paid, and twice that to get it repaired (if he'd repair it). By most accounts he's a good guy, just not really committed to the carrion as a business and kinda got bored and drifted on to other things.

The smallhd dp1 *can* be shoulder mounted. I wouldn't say it was ideal. Even though it is lightweight, its quite a large monitor. Finding a place to stick an almost 9" screen is a challenge. It blocks a pretty large part of your periphery.

I don't know of anyone using a dp1 on a steadicam with the monitor up high because that kinda violates several good-usage rules. 1 is to take the weight off the top of the rig, but the bigger one is that if your monitor is slung low, you can see where you are walking in your peripheral vision *as* you monitor your shot. It is quite dangerous to do any moves over complex terrain while looking up at the camera. Especially with a full body-rig, you have that much extra inertia to throw you around if you take a wrong step, so its just a bad idea to walk around ignoring your feet. And if you aren't walking around... well... then why use a steadicam?

hope that helped or something!
cheers
-a

[Dale Guthormsen]

Andrew,

Thanks for the information. I tried the monitor up high with the steady cam, definitely a mistake. I have the gear to mount low and will give that a go soon. I am farely new to this steady cam work. Was using my xlh1 with the monitor on the back but that just deemed to hard. (works great on the tripod however). I got a smaller fx1000 with the steady cam in mind and have used it and it works a lot easier for me.

I also made a larger upward slanted shade box for the DP 1, that works really nice outdoors.

Sometimes I think a black cloth like we used to use on the old 4x5 speed graphics with the focal plane shutter and full sized view (upside down mind you) would be a handy thing to have at times!!

I would not trade off my dp1


thanks again,

[Alex Raskin]

Originally Posted by Ryan Mitchell

... not bright in sunlight ...

What about the transflective technology? Here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/view-vid...ml#post1507089

[Ryan Mitchell]

Yep - the Marshall 651 has TFT, but the 70P doesn't - which is why Phil Bloom likes the 651 for his rig. Also part of the reason it's another $600 or so more than the 70P... :)

[Mark Petereit]

I'm not really sure what I did wrong on my first try with the DP1, but I need to pretty much retract all my rants.

I got a new JVC GY-HD250U to replace my ageing JVC GY-HD110U. When I was swapping everything, for some reason I decided to give the DP1 another shot. I'm not sure if it was the component DA I had been using, some whacked settings on the DP1 during my first try or my old JVC camera, but when I started shooting last Sunday with the new rig the DP1 performed flawlessly! I didn't experience any of the color banding or strobing, contrast and saturation were solid and the image was SHARP!

I'm really happy with the DP1 and looking forward to mounting the other two we bought atop our two other cameras. Highly recommend!

[Paul Joy]

Originally Posted by Paul Cook

Is there anyone else who has used one and moved to the other?

I've recently written about my experience in choosing between the SmallHD & Marshall.

Choosing an HDMI monitor – Marshall vs SmallHD | Paul Joy

I'm hoping to try out the Marshall 615 soon to see how that compares too.

[Andrew Dean]

Originally Posted by Mark Petereit

I'm not really sure what I did wrong on my first try with the DP1, but I need to pretty much retract all my rants.
... when I started shooting last Sunday with the new rig the DP1 performed flawlessly! I didn't experience any of the color banding or strobing, contrast and saturation were solid and the image was SHARP!

I'm really happy with the DP1 and looking forward to mounting the other two we bought atop our two other cameras. Highly recommend!

Thats good to hear. I was wondering why our experiences were so different. So I'm curious - since you have the dp1 sailing as it should be on the new camera, how does it compare side by side with the carrion now?

[Andrew Dean]

Originally Posted by Paul Joy

I've recently written about my experience in choosing between the SmallHD & Marshall.

Choosing an HDMI monitor – Marshall vs SmallHD | Paul Joy

I'm hoping to try out the Marshall 615 soon to see how that compares too.

Interesting read. Thanks. Your main beefs with the dp1 seem to be the battery life of batteries from a defective batch and the low light banding which no longer exists on the newer units. I'd be curious what you'd see with a side-by-side now that the dp1 has grown up a bit.

With mics everybody shares audio samples. I wish there was something similar with monitors so would swap files showing each other what they look like.

Tripod heads too. Its so frustrating to try to compare those without hands-on.

Oh well. Without the mystery we wouldn't be buying and selling so much gear, so really, its good for the economy! ha.

[Mark Petereit]

Originally Posted by Andrew Dean

Thats good to hear. I was wondering why our experiences were so different. So I'm curious - since you have the dp1 sailing as it should be on the new camera, how does it compare side by side with the carrion now?

It doesn't quite have the rich saturation of the Carrion, but I'm LOVING not having that big honkin' brick jiggling my rig on every pan. And there's NO COMPARISON when you look at service and support.

SmallHD: Same day email response. They called me a few days later to follow up on the previous issue and make sure I was a happy camper. Offered to drive down (from NC to SC) and just hang out if I had any other issues. SHAZAM!!

Carrion: Service? Support? Hello? Is anyone there? HELLO???

I have my three SmallHD DP1's mounted atop my three JVCs. The Carrion is in a bag stuffed under the sound booth somewhere. That pretty much says it all.

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

I dont understand it, everyone seems to love the smallhd DP1, but i cant stand it. Am I crazy? The image quality is pretty good if you have a high key scene, but any scene that has shadows in it seems to look absolutely horrible, where greys turn red and have lots of banding. Yes most LCDs are 6bit panels but usually they have reasonably good dithering so you dont see all the horrible banding, whats worse is you cant even set the black level correctly because the only way to avoid significant banding and colorshifting in shadows is to set black as grey by cranking brightness up past 60 which loses any chance of being able to use the monitor for color or exposure. And who ever heard of a field monitor with a >10sec boot up time (that only tells you whether its on/off/in the process of booting up by the color of a small led on the back)? and low capacity batteries that give no indication of when they are going to die on you? I dont know whats going on with the scaling in the DP1 but it always seems like its going through some kind of weird analog scaling circuit that softens everything and never gives you pixel sharpness even when using a 1080p image. maybe im weird but id rather a 480p lcd with sharp downscaling to the point of aliasing over a 720p lcd where everything looks a soft.

[Andrew Dean]

I suppose it depends on why you buy a monitor and what you expect of it as to how you perceive it.

The dp1 had noise in the bottom 5% of the luminance of the image. Why it wasn't a problem has been hashed over and over in the forums. The bottom line being that it falls in parts of the image that are typically problematic with most cameras. If you have something important that falls into the noisy area, then you should change something to make it not fall into the dark anyways.

The dp1x fixed the dark noise problem, so if you have a dp1 that causes you to punch the wall... $99 later and the dark noise is gone.

The rest of your complaints sound a bit like you are really wanting to be unhappy. The "low capacity" batteries are low price and low weight too. 2.5 hours off a $60 battery that comes with a charger and barely changes the weight of the rig is awesome. If your batteries are severely worse than that, you should talk to support. There were a couple bad batches. The smallHD batteries are great for short shoots or when weight/size is at a premium. If i need a longer uninterrupted shoot, then I don't bother with them. There is nothing that comes close to the same size/weight/duration/price on the market. If you want something that lasts a lot longer, then size, weight and price shoot right up.

If you turn off the smallHD splash you can save several seconds on boot. Its in the preferences. The new firmware on the dp1x i believe disables it by default. I've never timed it, but i don't think 10 seconds sounds right.

As to "everything looking soft"... I've put my dp1 side by side on working sets with damn near every pro monitor out there. I've had DPs choose my dp1 for focus over sony, panasonic, ikan, marshall, and red monitors. I agree that the analog scaling in the dp1 could be better... but compared to what? The only thing i've found that comes close to besting the dp1 is the dp1x.

Everybody has their own opinion and preference. It very well may be that the dp1 is not the monitor for you. We all have our priorities for what assistance our tools should provide. Some people cannot breathe without peaking. I want all the overlays off on my monitor. The beauty is that there are several choices on the market.

I'm an old fart. I've used my share of black and white viewfinders, and "field monitors" that weighed as much as a field, got 40 minutes off a v-lock brick and whose "black" was closer to 25 IRE. I admit to having a particular fondness for the smallHD line, but really, compared to what we used to work with, any of the modern monitors are a step up. The fact that we have sub $1k options that *can* work is awesome. I think we are a few years from "perfection" with resolution/color/brightness/sunlight/weight/cost but we seem to be getting closer and closer. I'm a geek so i'll keep doing side-by-sides on shoots.

I think its an awesome time to be a video/film geek.