FEATURE | MON I TOR I NG
SCREEN SAVER AS HDR FINISHING BECOMES THE NORM FOR MANY STUDIOS WE LOOK AT WHAT’S NEW IN THE MONITORING WORLD
WORDS PH I L RHODES
O ne thing the TV industry really wants is a video display that can achieve black blacks, healthy bright whites, and a wide range of colours all in one unit. For a long time, it’s seemed that organic LED displays – LEDs – offered a near-perfect solution to the problem, with the ability to treat each individual pixel on the display as a set of lights that could be individually controlled. Crucially, those lights could be turned entirely off, finally producing a technology that could, like no other, achieve a true black. It seemed like a solution. And for many applications, it’s a very good solution. OLED took a long time to develop, with small demonstration panels shown at trade shows for years before the first broadcast monitors appeared. The key limitation is brightness. The issue was manageable with conventional, standard dynamic range work, which demands
a bit more than 100 candles per square metre, abbreviated 100 NITs. HDR finishing, on the other hand, demands whites up to ten times brighter while ideally leaving the blacks as black as they ever were. Sony went some way to meeting this demand with the BVM-X300, which combines the inky blacks of OLED with the soaring brightness and colour performance of 1000-NIT HDR. HDR GRADING Laurent Treherne, Chief Technology Officer at Goldcrest Post Production in London, is happy with the company’s five X300s. “We use these monitors for SDR and HDR grading including HDR10 and Dolby Vision passes. The monitor calibration is a critical process for us and the X300 has been easy to align both in SDR and HDR. We regularly check the calibration of each monitor and all of them have been extremely stable so far.”
For a long time it’s seemed that organic LED displays offered a near-perfect solution to the problem
46 DEF I N I T ION | JANUARY 20 1 9
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