| Jaron Berman |
March 30th, 2006 03:23 PM |
Don't!
Production monitors are great....when they're real. I tried for a couple years to get by with a ton of different "clever" solutions to monitor cheaply. Truth be told, in the end I spent WAY more money trying to get a solution that would both work and look professional enough to bring on a shoot, than if I had just bought a proper monitor in the first place. I tried sony consumer tvs - they look good but they aren't accurate or hi-rez by any stretch of the imagination.
I think the first thing you need to do is consider why you need the monitor in the first place. Is this for the field? Editing? Both? If it is for the field, who is it for, the camera op, the gaffers, or the producer/director? You'd be surprised by what you may actually "need" in the field. For framing and focus checking, you'd be silly to spend $100 on an LCD. Anything even close to that price range will disappoint you, I will absolutely guarantee it. In fact, below $1200, you'd probably be hard pressed to find an LCD that could even approximate close to the resolution of a low-end consumer DV cam. For lighting, use a combination of a good monitor and waveform/vectorscope. That's the only way to be 100% accurate with lighting.
For SD production, get a black and white monitor. Even the cheapest ($89 for a Marshall at B&H) B&W monitor will have FAR more resolution than a multi-hundred dollar color monitor. There's a Sanyo for like $114 that will do 800 lines. Try finding a price for that in a color monitor! If focus checking and portability and framing are your concerns, go black and white.
If color accuracy is your concern, multiply your budget by 30 for a decent LCD or 6 for a decent color monitor. Accurate, repeatable color is VERY difficult. At the bare minimum, get a monitor with a blue only function. This is EXTREMELY important for a field monitor. Tubes of any sort are not 100% repeatable if you move them. They also age. If color is your concern don't buy a used monitor, no matter how good a deal you can get, and get a blue gun function. People have all sorts of workarounds for the blue gun function, but in truth - if it's not convenient, you won't do it. If you don't recalibrate the monitor every time you move it, you won't be getting accurate, repeatable color. If you're not getting that....well why have an expensive color monitor?
Evaluate your needs and look at all your options before you buy. You're the only one who knows how you work, so find something that works for your shooting style. But from experience, I can tell you that in every single case, buy what you think you'll need later on, even if it's more. You'll be happier down the road...and if you choose to get out of that road, it's way easier to sell good gear than cheap gear... you'll make out better (and cheaper) in the end. Hope that helps!
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