HD Monitors and Video Cards

[TingSern Wong]

Originally Posted by Peter Wiley

There are no good LCD HD monitoring solutions for under $12-14K, "good" meaning good enough (and even these have problems) to do consistent color grading. There is a Sony HD CRT that costs $56K.

So I would not agonize too much about the best choice at the low end, they are all not so good.

The general problem with less expensive LCDs is that the contrast ratios are such that they lie about blacks . . . which could be critical to adjusting high contrast dance recital footage. A perfectly reasonable choice is to use a good quality consumer HDTV if that is what the majorty of your audience will see your work on. Of course people can look at DVDs on their computers too, but it's hard to optimise for both HDTVs and computer screens.

Wow? $12-14K? I have a Panasonic BT-LH1700W here - is only about $2500 (US). It is certainly broadcast grade monitor ... can accept nearly all kinds of input signals (analog component, SDI, etc, etc). The colours are pretty very accurate as well.

[Armando Serrano]

Originally Posted by TingSern Wong

Wow? $12-14K? I have a Panasonic BT-LH1700W here - is only about $2500 (US). It is certainly broadcast grade monitor ... can accept nearly all kinds of input signals (analog component, SDI, etc, etc). The colours are pretty very accurate as well.

Tingsen, I just purchased a Mac Pro Dual 3.0 Ghz Xeon with 16Gb of RAM and using the ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB (2 x dual-link DVI) video card. I will be editing my HD using Final Cut Pro Studio 2 and I'm now researching to buy the LCD monitors. Here are my quetions;

What comjputer are you using?

What video card?

How did you connect your Panasonic BT-LH1700W to your video card?

Is the BT-LH1700W the only monitor you now use or do you have a second monitor for the video editing application?

I'm looking to buy a Panasonic BT-LH2600W (not cheap!)...

http://catalog2.panasonic.com/webapp...del=BT-LH2600W

Thank you in advance for your reply.

[TingSern Wong]

I am using a PC workstation ... Supermicro server board, dual Xeon dual core processors (3 Ghz) - 8GB RAM. I/O is Adaptec Raid controller - 8 SCSI drives, dual channels.

PC Video card - Matrox Millennium P650 PCIe 128. One Viewsonic CRT 23", one Viewsonic LCD 19".

Video Editing - Canopus NX with component output. The Panasonic LCD monitor is connected to the Canopus card via component cables. Your LCD (2600W) is the bigger brother of my 17" version (1700W). Everything else is the same, except the resolution.

I have another Panasonic LCD monitor - the smaller version (BT-LH80W) - which I use for monitoring on the move.

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Please note - the colour space for video editing (in component output) is different from the normal video card (ATI Radeon). One is operating in YUV whereas the ATI is RGB. The colours you get is totally different. If you want to do colour calibration / correction on a motion video using component output, you cannot use the ATI Radeon's output.