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Reader SurveySmall Screens Meeting Big Demands
Feb 14, 2006 12:16 PM, John McKeon
When you can buy a 37-inch LCD TV for less than $2,000, who would spend more than three grand for a screen only eight inches across?
Answer: Some of the most demanding video professionals in the business. Whether on location, in mobile vans, broadcast studios, edit suites or other settings, top quality small displays are booming.
Small LCD displays, of course, are everywhere these days. They’re built into minivans so the kids can watch “Madagascar” instead of repeating, “Are we there yet?” Personal DVD players consume many thousands of units, and the professional AV channel specifies six-, eight- or 10-inch panels for every setting from retail to zoos.
But the high end of the small-screen market runs by entirely different rules. Instead of fifty bucks, these small screens can cost thousands, and some very discriminating eyes judge them.
Thom Belford, director of marketing and engineering at Marshall Electronics, El Segundo, CA, (www.marshallelectronics.net) says his company makes high definition video displays as small as 3.5 inches, and finds that small displays fall into one of two categories: rack-mounted and stand-alone.
“The main application for the very small monitors is usually signal confidence or presence,” Belford says. These, and slightly larger screens, are often rack mounted.
“In many cases, rack mount configurations are used to replace aging CRT technology with the added benefit of lower cost of operation as measured in terms of mean time before failure, maintenance cost, and power consumption,” Belford adds. Economy of space and low weight add to the functional appeal of the product, he says. Small monitors are often combined in arrays of two, three or more monitors and are flexible enough to handle a wide range of inputs.
Stand-alone monitors are chiefly in demand for field production, Belford adds., including “video assist for film, camera monitor, talent monitor, portable engineering signal confidence tests. We even have models used by IT technicians for field applications and repair of computers, printers, servers, and so on,” Belford says.
Monitors headed for the field are often ruggedized, with protective screen covers, battery operation, and other features.
Jin Miyano of the North American marketing office for Japan-based ERG Ventures (www.erg-ventures.com), says location shooting is the main application for the company’s six-inch monitors, while the 8.4 inch models find their way into post production settings.
Both monitors offer high definition and 4:3 aspect ratios. Miyano sees “a demand for 16:9 all the time, and that’s another issue for the industry,” he says. “At this point we just don’t have the panels.”
Manufacturers may have prioritized production of larger panel sizes, including wide-screen models, simply because of the vast demands of the consumer electronics market, Miyano says.
The supply issue won’t last forever, though. “It’s only an issue of time,” Miyano says.
Meanwhile, he adds, what chiefly distinguishes ERG’s small monitors from the small LCD panels scattered all over society is color accuracy. “We try to match the color of traditional CRTs,” Miyano says. “There are so many competitors, and we are all using the same LCD panel, so the challenge is how we adjust the color accuracy. That’s what the industry demands.”
Neither resolution nor brightness rivals color quality as the decisive factor in product selection. Miyano notes, after all, that many of these small monitors end up being used in darkened rooms. “Generally speaking, we don’t have many inquiries about brightness,” he says. And HD resolution is a given.
Belford agrees that image quality really drives the sales decision in this niche. “We use the highest resolution screens with CRT-style color gamut,” he says, noting “moving interlaced video is the acid test.”
In addition, Belford says, his company has opted for a completely digital product line, “eliminating digital-to-analog conversion errors and always displaying a progressive image.”
A variety of proprietary design and image management features enables these monitors to “present the best possible image with no impact on temporal and spatial resolutions that are usually associated with digital LCD displays.” Once again, the goal is to emulate the long-standard CRT monitor in terms of color gamut, color temperature and other quality metrics.
