GEAR MONITORS
QUANTUM LEAP Flanders’ OLED monitors are ideal for on-set HDR monitoring due to their lightweight and fanless design
need calibration, which historically might have involved five figures of test and measurement equipment. “There are several good monitors out there,” Desmet reflects, “and a lot of good calibration solutions, but people are intimidated by the cost of those solutions and the complexity. They’re not professional calibrators and may make mistakes. As a result, people don’t calibrate their displays as often as they should. “We tried to tackle that to make calibration affordable and easy for a colourist who is more artistic than technical to plug in a probe. You’re not using external test pattern generators, or having to use an external piece of software with a bunch of settings.” Something that unifies the monitor market, though, is the ever-increasing
blue compounds, and age at different rates; the blue ages rapidly. So typically, when you measure one that’s been in use for a few years, it’s not anywhere near 1000 nits any more. “The blue in a quantum-dot OLED is not the type of material used in [previous designs],” Desmet adds. “It’s much more efficient, and doesn’t have the same rate of decay. You have better stability, less differential ageing. There are efforts underway to make something like that but not to drive it with light at all. That’s going to be an OLED which is driven directly by electronics – skip having a light source and these quantum-dot OLEDs would glow by being fed by transistors directly.” Regardless of the underlying technology, though, any monitor will
affordability. This has not always been the case at the high end, which has affected the ability – or willingness – of productions to deploy HDR displays in the field. “Interestingly, these are a third of the cost of previous HDR monitors,” Desmet concludes. “They’re also a third of the weight. It’s thin and light enough, while also quiet because they are fanless, so people can bring these on-set. Nobody wants to bring a $30,000 monitor on-set for any length of time because they’re such a huge expense. You now have an increasing number of people who can carry out HDR monitoring on-set. If you want to light well for HDR, you must be able to visualise that.” This key realisation applies to almost any circumstance under which someone points a camera at something – and it’s difficult not to appreciate the ever- improving ways to see what’s going on. With whole new OLED technologies on the horizon, monitoring is a rare part of film and television in the 2020s – a place where the fundamental technology is actually still improving.
NOBODY WANTS TO BRING A $30,000 monitor ON-SET BECAUSE IT WOULD BE such a huge expense ”
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