Bruno Mansi

New LG OLEDs reaching Broadcast Monitor Standards

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For those of you who dream of owning a Sony BVM X300, the new LG OLED TVs may be the alternative.

The 2016 models are making quite a stir, with claims that they are matching studio grade, 4K colour critical monitors. They don't have SDI inputs of course, but reviewers are saying that the panels are visually indistinguishable from perfect in areas such as colour and luminance accuracy.

Other major bullet points are...

  • Perfect black levels (0 cd/m2)
  • The highest peak brightness for an OLED TV (630 to 730 cd/m² for HDR)
  • The smallest brightness variation with viewing angle up through 45 degrees
  • 98% DCI-P3 gamut at 4K
  • Excellent average screen reflections (1.1%)

There's an in-depth article for those interested at...

http://www.displaymate.com/OLED_TV2016_ShootOut_1.htm

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4 hours ago, Margus Voll said:

Sony monitors calibration is somewhat limited and does not make it super exiting as we can not expect ultimate precision.

I assume you're talking about certain issues that have been going around about the factory calibration accuracy of the BVM-X300 and the inability to allow users to properly re-calibrate the displays. For those who want more information about this, head over to...

http://www.liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php?threads/sony-bvm-x300-factory-calibration.7195/

However, the original post wasn't really about the Sony display, but more on the quality of the new LG OLED panels, which would seem to rival some of the best reference monitors out there, at a much lower cost.

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47 minutes ago, Alex Prohorushkin said:

This is impressive for monitors that price out at $5,000 for the 65' and $3,500 for the 55'

The lack of professional features that are found in broadcast monitors and the lack of SDI inputs may be a problem for some post houses, but they should make great client monitors.

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On 25.11.2016 at 0:45 PM, Szilárd Tőtszegi said:

The LG Oled's internal calibration is terrible, and buggy, if you want to have an accurate and calibration result, you are going to need a LUT box, and there is a lot of noise in the shadow areas. I owned one, and returned it after a week. 

What kind of LUT-box are you talking about?

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Interesting comments about the problems in the shadow areas. I wonder why this wasn't picked up in the reviewer's (supposedly) in-depth testing. Maybe a bad batch? I would have thought LG would be able to fix this problem.

Looking into this a bit further, I did discover that there are black issues that manufacturers have to address in OLED displays, because they they do go down to almost pure back. One of these is macro-blocking in the near-black regions of the picture. One of the ways of masking this problem is to use dithering, which might account for the noise that's been seen. One review mentioned that LG purposely set their factory default brightness setting to slightly crush the blacks, in an attempt to hide this problem. Once they'd set it to the correct levels, the dithering became evident.

On 25/11/2016 at 11:45 AM, Szilárd Tőtszegi said:

The LG Oled's internal calibration is terrible, and buggy, if you want to have an accurate and calibration result, you are going to need a LUT box, and there is a lot of noise in the shadow areas.

At the end of the day, these sorts of issues are going to explain why the Sony BVM X300 is around six times the price of the LG offering, and even the Sony has it's critics!

22 hours ago, Alex Prohorushkin said:

What kind of LUT-box are you talking about?

At the low end there's the eeColor box, further up the price range we have the AJA LUT box, the Fuji IS Mini and the Flanders BoxIO. They're all able to connect to, or accept LUTs generated from calibration software such as Spectracal's Calman or Light Illusion's Lightspace.

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On 25.11.2016 at 12:45 PM, Szilárd Tőtszegi said:

and there is a lot of noise in the shadow areas.

We experienced the same thing, but by redusing the default sharpen parameteres that created white circles around the pixels especially seen in the shadow areas, the noise dissapeared.

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52 minutes ago, Thomas Singh said:

We experienced the same thing...

Is this with the 2016 model? I've heard that general black level performance has been improved with the 2017 models.

I'm hoping to get a 55" B7 by the end of this year - mainly for domestic viewing, so any tips about the best settings for this model would be appreciated.

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