[Tig] Opinions on the JVC DT-V24L1D?

[Tyler Hawes]

One of the VARs we work with loaned us this monitor for a week. We ran
familiar material (movies we've graded) through it to evaluate it, as well
as test signals. 

Here were my observations for the unit we had:

Blacks: The absolute black point was CRT-like, which is to say very good.
JVC puts a dark tinted filter on the screen to cut the minimum luminance of
the LCD down to a real black (something LCDs are incapable of by
themselves), and I'm guessing (based on artifacts I'll mention below) that
they use post-processing in the unit to compensate for the way this changes
the grayscale response.

Motion: I could see the grain structure of 35mm film on an HD-RGB scan,
which a lot of LCD screens blur out due to their poor latency. Motion looked
filmic and without any sort of breakup that you sometimes get from
mismatched refresh/frame rates.

Features: Aspect and safe markers for 4:3, 14:9, 16:9, 1.85:1, 2.35:1 covers
pretty much all your needs. Onscreen audio meters that you can group in
pairs or distribute them more geographically like the 5.1 layout (not sure
how else to say that). There was some other cool stuff I can't recall, but I
was happy with the features. The one biggie missing is there is only
single-link HDSDI, not dual-link. You'd think there'd at least be an option
slot, but I didn't see one. Hopefully someone will speak up and correct me
that there is an option, but to the best of my knowledge there isn't.

Color: Here was the let down. Unfortunately, whatever processing they're
doing to work with that black filter (or at least that's what I'm guessing
is at fault) was looking really bad to me. The gamma seemed extremely bright
(like the difference between 1.8 and 2.2), and the transition from dark grey
to black very coarse. As best I could tell, the colors seemed natural, but
how can I judge when the contrast is wonky? To me this looked bad enough
that I wouldn't use it for any sort of color decisions, even at an editorial
level. I know this can never be perfect, since they only have so much
information in the signal to reshape and the interaction with the filter
must be complex. However, I think if they worked on the software processing
a bit more, they should be able to improve this by an order of magnitude. If
they did, we'd probably buy some of these.

DISCLAIMER: I only looked at this one unit and have not spoken to JVC about
my observations. It's entirely possible that there was something wrong with
this unit, so you should look at one for yourself. We haven't had time to
look into this, so please let us know if you get different results...




--
Tyler A. Hawes
Liquid Digital Intermediates, LLC
t: 310.393.1260  f: 888.769.1786
www.LiquidCompanies.com




On 5/15/07 7:56 PM, "Mel Matsuoka" <mel at montaj9.com> wrote:
> Anybody here have any opinions on the JVC DT-V24L1D "Reference Grade"
> LCD monitor?