VISUALS GEAR.
better pictures and the capability and proliferation of consumer electronics. Those are the things that influence what distributors demand, and so control how the picture standards we distribute change in practice. It might easily keep the goalposts moving for another few years.
image-based lighting panel, with RGB plus warm and cool white emitters. The collaboration between Brompton and Roe led to a video wall panel with a single white chip, intended to create a better colour quality of light for virtual production rather than to create a better display for the human eye. In the end, it’s hard to predict where monitoring technology will go over the next few years. Further improvements to LCD are almost inevitable, but the relevance of that will depend on whether they’re overtaken by advances in OLED (which have been sought for decades with mixed success) or whether microLED becomes more mainstream (which is harder to predict). What may matter more is the progress of those new SMPTE standards, the audience demand for
colourimetry of Rec. 2020, which is still a three-colour system. Depending on the choice of green, it still has to choose between the ability to show yellow-greens and the ability to show blue- greens. What that often means is a better ability to render things like tropical water. It’s been demonstrated as a display technology which is much more capable of accurately representing existing picture standards, although it could do a lot more. The perceived value of that to users remains to be seen. Putting more than just red, green and blue on a video wall panel is something we’ve seen a bit more of recently, principally from Kino Flo with its Mimik device. Mimik is perhaps most fairly described as a video-controlled
WORK SMART Lots of compact
display technology is initially developed for smartphone use
Streaming Sending video to someone in a neighbouring timezone was once such a big deal that the Eurovision Song Contest was developed in order to promote the ability to do just that. Atomos’ Connect cloud features now allow much the same thing to happen – but from right there on set. Although there’s a question to be asked about whether it’s a good idea to allow any production executive, anywhere on the planet, to tune in to the live feed of a working set. SmallHD relies on stablemate Teradek for transmission and cloud integration features, although SmallHD’s tidy page-based user interface stays popular given the
quantity and quality of test and measurement features. Still, the killer feature might well be sheer brightness. Anyone who wants to work on a mountaintop in full sun will be pleased to know that the SmallHD Ultra 5 display now offers 3000-nit brightness. That’s ten times the output of a fairly bright computer monitor, keeping things visible regardless of the conditions.
65. JULY 2023
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