Like it or not, LCDs now dominate the flat-panel market. But which models and brands really measure up-and how do you pick the right one for your studio?
Buying the right monitor has become even more complicated than in previous years, especially if you work in video production. Traditionally, video professionals have favored CRT monitors for their rich color gamut and fast response time. In case you haven’t noticed, performance-oriented CRTs have become extremely difficult to find. That has left a big performance gap for video editors who work with fast-moving images.
"If they could get aperture grill CRTs, they would still be buying them," says Rhoda Alexander, director of monitor research for iSuppli Corporation. "They’re still buying the remaining quantities that are out there on the market, mainly for the brightness, pixel response rate and overall performance." Alexander revealed that Sony and NEC didn’t ship any CRTs in the first quarter of this year, though some may still be available on retail shelves. "They’re largely gone," she says.
If you attended NAB this year, you quickly realized that CRT offerings from other large companies had gone the way of the original Sands Hotel. "The high-end CRTs have just vanished," explains Ian Miller, director of technology for Samsung Information Systems America. "The only thing that’s commonly available at the moment for this market is LCDs." The performance-based video and hardcore gamer markets aren’t large enough to be viable in their own. "And other markets have been more than happy to move to LCD," he says.
Two years ago, Miller was involved in discussions with the Hollywood studios, when the manufacturers warned the studios that CRT monitors were about to disappear. "They were using a mixture of Panasonic and Sony monitors and had been told by both companies they were going out of production," says Miller. It presented a dilemma for the studios. They could have stocked up on CRTs at a significant cost and stored them until needed. They could have begun to switch to LCDs, even though the LCD color fidelity was nowhere near where it is today. Or they could have continued to use their CRTs and hoped LCDs would be good enough by the time their current monitors reached end of life.
CLOSING THE GAP
Today, the buying decision hasn’t become much easier either for the Hollywood studios or the independent video professional. LCDs have improved dramatically in their color gamut, and today’s LCD displays are capable of achieving the full or nearly full spectrum of the NTSC color standard. The problem for monitor buyers? If the color gamut is given as a percentage of the NTSC standard, the specifications almost never indicate which standard they’re referring to. "In most cases, they’re talking about the original 1953 NTSC color gamut, which has never been realized until very recently with a few prototype devices," Miller explains. "CRTs never even approached it." A second NTSC standard (usually referred to as SMPTE C for NTSC) was proposed in 1979. "They refined the color gamut of NTSC and drastically reduced it," he says. "They reduced it to what was possible with CRT phosphors. Today, when people talk about a percentage of NTSC, they very rarely tell you what they’re referencing."
The good news, according to Miller, is that LCDs are competitive with CRTs in terms of color gamut. "They have been for several years," he explains. "Both will approximate to the EBU [European Broadcasting Union standard], which approximates NTSC and ATSC." If you work strictly in video- from capture to presentation- you can now use an LCD monitor to judge how it will appear on broadcast television. "Where there’s a concern in video is that some of the film color standards have a larger gamut, which you can not reproduce accurately." That would be true with any electronic monitor, whether it’s CRT-, LCD- or plasma-based, or one of the upcoming display technologies, such as OLED or SED. "All electronic displays fail against the best of film," says Miller, "though the gap is closing."
If a wide color gamut is essential to your work, you might consider buying an LCD display that uses LED backlights rather than the traditional cold cathode fluorescent lamps. (For more on the technology behind LEDs, see Pete Putman’s column on page 29.) Be prepared for sticker shock, though. At press time, NEC’s LED-backlit 21-inch LCD monitor (the NEC SpectraView LCD2180WG) had a list price of $6,749. Why are LED-based monitors so expensive? "They have to physically handpick which LEDs they’re going to use in the backlight," says Chris Connery, a monitor analyst for DisplaySearch. "It’s very labor intensive. They call it binning, because they sort them into different bins." Connery expects LED-backlit LCD monitors to come down in price as the binning process becomes automated. "As the LED marketplace matures, it will translate into TVs. With TVs comes volume. And with volume comes lower pricing."
HOW FAST IS FAST?
You might think that determining the response time for an LCD monitor would be much easier than pinning down the color gamut. After all, most manufacturers include the pixel response rate in their specification listings. Unfortunately, once again there are two standards for measurement. You can measure the pixel response rate from gray-to-gray or from black-to-white. "People argue back and forth as to which is the valid measurement for response time," says Connery. "It stands to reason that most people aren’t operating every pixel in a full-on or full-off state at any given point. And it’s really those gray areas in between where most video is represented. So when you look at it from that side of the coin, gray-to-gray is a perfectly valid response time measurement."
The problem comes when you try to compare the pixel response times for two monitors with no indication of the measurement standard. "There might be a 19-inch monitor you can buy from Best Buy that has a 12 millisecond on-to-off, but 2 millisecond gray-to-gray," Connery explains. "Is a regular consumer going to appreciate that nuance? Probably not." When buying a monitor, check the manufacturer’s Web site or try to pin down the sales representative for the reference standard. As you might expect, the better response times tend to be gray-to-gray. In the first quarter of this year, BenQ, Samsung, and ViewSonic had LCD monitors that were rated at 2 milliseconds (examples include BenQ’s 19-inch FP93GX, Samsung’s 17-inch 740BF and ViewSonic’s 19-inch VX922). Acer, NEC-Mitsubishi, Samsung and ViewSonic had LCD monitors rated at 4 milliseconds; and Acer, NEC-Mitsubishi and Samsung had LCD monitors rated at 6 milliseconds. The list of manufacturers with 8-millisecond LCD monitors opened up to encompass Acer, AOC, BenQ, Dell, Eizo Nanao, Gateway, iiyama, LG Electronics, Mag, NEC-Mitsubishi, Philips, Planar, Princeton Graphics, Proview, Samsung, Sceptre, Sony, Sylvania, ViewSonic and Westinghouse. On the other side of the ledger, you could still buy LCD monitors in the first quarter of this year with 35-, 40-, 55-, 60- and even 80-millisecond ratings.
Take these pixel response ratings with a grain of salt as there’s no set-in-concrete procedure for determining the response time. The best advice for video professionals? Try before you buy. "You need to bring it in-house," explains Connery. "With the higher-priced ticket items, a lot of companies will allow for some sort of program for the IT department to check it out."
MORE TRADEOFFS
Keep in mind that a 2-millisecond pixel response rate is still much slower than the response rate for a typical CRT monitor. "The response time for LCDs is measured in milliseconds, while the response time for CRTs is measured in nanoseconds," explains iSuppli’s Alexander. "In addition, the viewing angle on a CRT is still better than that on an LCD. Even though you have a 180-degree viewing angle on an LCD, it’s not necessarily equivalent to what you get on a CRT."
We generally think of monitor specifications in terms of absolutes. In fact, they’re often a result of tradeoffs. "For the larger size displays, the tradeoffs usually come between the response time and the viewing angle," says Connery. "For a 21-inch display, it’s either an IPS- (In-Plane Switching) or VA- (Vertical Alignment) based viewing-angle technology that’s needed. And when you use those technologies, the response times slow down." Larger LCD displays also have a harder time maintaining the color gamut when you move from the center-based sweet spot. "If you’re working at 18 inches or so from the monitor, that’s not a major problem because you’re sitting there looking pretty much straight at the screen," says Miller. It’s the 40-inch and larger displays where off-axis color shifts can become a problem. "If you have 10 or 20 clients sitting around the conference table, you want to make sure they all have a good view," he says.
Looking again at the LCD monitors that were available in the first quarter, we see a wide range of viewing angles, from 90 to 178 degrees on the horizontal axis and 60 to 178 degrees on the vertical axis. Quite a few models had a 178-degree viewing angle for both the horizontal and vertical axes. Examples include Acer’s 24-inch AL2416Wd, Dell’s 24-inch 2405FPW, Eizo Nanao’s 21.3-inch S2100-BK, Gateway’s 21-inch FPD2185W, HP’s 21-inch F2105, Lenovo’s 19-inch IBM 9410-L191p, LG Electronic’s 32-inch L3200TF, NEC-Mitsubishi’s 21.3-inch NEC LCD2190UXi-BK, Philips’ 23-inch 230WP7NS, Samsung’s 24-inch 244T-BK and Sony’s 20.1-inch S205FB. If you expect to have more than one person viewing the monitor simultaneously, don’t just rely on the published viewing angles. Check it out for yourself. Pay close attention to how the brightness, color fidelity and contrast range are affected as you move towards the sides of the display.
Also keep in mind that in order to artificially boost the performance in one area, a manufacturer may have to sacrifice the performance in another area. The other option is for a manufacturer to bump up the price. "You can do some things to improve the off-axis color, but they cost money," says Miller. "Depending on the market, you may or may not choose to make that tradeoff. All electronic displays are a set of tricks, and this is just another one."
In addition to his reviews for this magazine, contributing editor David English evaluates software and hardware for CNET.com and Computer Shopper magazine.