Calibrating LCDs

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columbus171

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I was wondering how you would go about calibrating an apple or dell lcd for use on set. I know most broadcast grade crts and lcds have external controls where they can be lined up using internal bars from camera, but inexpensive hi res lcds don't have these controls. Normally when you calibrate them you use cheap software with a colour optix from companies like x-rite or gretagmacbeth.
It would be great if redcine could be used with a coiour optix to create a LUT that could be applied to camera to calibrate your LCD. Either that or it could accept .icc profiles and convert them to .LUT files for use in camera. It would mean you would also need to be able to apply a second LUT for colour grade.
Maybe there is an easier way to do this, but if I want to use a cheaper apple cinema display and don't want to fork out for a cinetal or something similar I can't think of a easy way to do it. Anyone got any ideas.

Thanks in advance for any replies.
 
First off, you are not alone in looking for the Holy Grail of using mass market LCD displays for grading and/or color accurate on set monitoring. The hardcores swear by the good ol' Sony CRTs but they are hardly portable, rediculously expensive and being discontinued for environmental reasons, other than that...

There must be more voodoo in the deal than just a LUT because the Sony Luma series LCDs are roundly drummed. The Panasonic LT series is better but the 17" lacks snap and the 26" is only 1366x768 and costs $5K. eCinema is supposed to be coming out with a "budget" version in Q1 of 2007 for only $5K though that still is a lot of coin.

The "professional" LCD monitor market demands a price premium that I do not believe will hold up. It looks like they are trying to recoup their R&D costs in a hurry. One bright spot in the near term is that LED and OLED tech looks like it will supplant CCFLs for the BLUs (back light units) which will require less filtering to create a color temperature neutral source. There is also a huge demand on the consumer side for color accurate LCDs as the OEMs compete for market share.

Better yet, companies like Apple would love to sell you a large LCD screen that does video well, not just display text. I believe that the next update of Apple's monitor line (MWSF in 2 weeks I hope) will offer better hardware for color gamut, contrast and latency plus software calibration tools aimed at the media content creation community that will go beyond ColorSync and perhaps even auto switch between several profiles depending on the application in the frontmost window. OK, maybe I'm dreaming on that last one but it sure would be the perfect default setting for most users - if you are working in Excel you want high contrast but not too bright, the same for Word - in Photoshop you want 6500Kelvin and all the steps of greyscale you can get - in Final Cut you want pretty much the same with lower brightness since you are color correcting in a darkened or at least dimly lit room, right? Obviously those of us who are tweaks can go through a Color Sync style dialog routine to get the settings finely tuned.

In any case, my advice is to wait as long as you can because there are more options coming soon and prices are dropping fast.

Blair S. Paulsen
RedOne #19
 
Thanks for the advice. I agree nothing beats CRTs for colour accurracy and how they preceive motion. This company has developed profiling software so you can save your calibration profile as an LUT, it's called cineprofiler http://cinespace.risingsunresearch.com/. I don't don't if it would make cheaper LCDs more accurate where you could load the profile in to a red camera. It would be great if this could be done in redcine using a colour optix from xrite or someone else. Anyway I suppose your right technology is moving faster than ever and we seem to be getting everything we want quicker than we all probably expected.
 
6500K is not a standard white point; many people confuse it with D65. D65 is slightly greener than 6500K. You can look up the chromaticity co-ordinates, which will define the while points exactly. i.e. see
http://etconsult.com/papers/White Paper Matt Cowan.pdf

Not that people can actually tell. Your vision pretty much "white balances" itself to what its looking at (unless you are looking at extreme colors like streetlights, in which case that light never looks white). Because people have such a hard time telling the difference, some colorimeters and broadcast monitors have a white point of "6500K".

For print/ICC, the standard white points are D50 and/or D65. (D50 for cheaper setups.) For video work, the standard white point is D65. For DCI, the standard white point is P3 I believe. For film projection (not digital projection), I believe the standard white point is 5400K.
 
1- If a CRT has been used a lot, it will have problems with grayscale tracking.

2- First off, you are not alone in looking for the Holy Grail of using mass market LCD displays for grading and/or color accurate on set monitoring.

This Ecinemasys product was designed to work with the old (plastic bezel) Apple Cinema Displays:
http://www.ecinemasys.com/products/edp100/edp100_intro.htm

Blackmagic makes a similar, cheaper product (and likely inferior, but I've seen neither product).

Martin Euredjian has since moved on to re-building his own LCD panels, so that he can get consistent manufacturing (unlike the Apple displays) and trick the monitor out (i.e. deeper blacks). By having the LCDs not drift, the Ecinemasys monitors can be calibrated once at the factory and don't have to be re-calibrated again.

Multiple companies are working on IMLED LCDs, which should offer better black level than what's currently possible. There's also SED. So you might see monitor technologies constantly shift.

3- I don't believe that the Dell or Apple LCDs have LUTs that you, the user, can really tweak. The Apple LCD I believe doesn't apply any sort of LUTs (1-D, 2-D, 3-D, or otherwise) and this is actually a good thing. It's good to avoid multiple LUTs (this just hurts precision), and you can implement LUTs better outside the monitor.
 
The Ecinema systems product the edp100 seems the best product but quite expensive, blackmagic's hdlink seems to be the best option I didn't realise it had a calibrating function so should work ok. Thanks
 
I used the HD-link for a week.

Has stayed in the box ever after.

Apples CinemaDesktop feature in FCP is better IMO

Gunleik
 
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