Sony has put a lot of effort into bringing OLED displays to the production business. Their PVM-740 monitor has had great success, and they followed it up with a 17″ (PVM-1741) and 25″ (PVM-2541) version as well. On the high end, Sony has released their BVM-E and BVM-F series of monitors in the same 17″ and 25″ sizes. The difference between the monitors can be a bit confusing; watch my video above to learn more, and see the chart below for more specifics.

…continue reading Sony’s OLED Displays and the Decimator MD-DUCC

A camera can only be as good as the recording made from it. In the past year or so we’ve seen some interesting new portable recording devices such as the AJA Ki Pro and the Convergent Design nanoFlash. Now comes the Cinedeck Extreme, which is not only an excellent recorder but also doubles as a full-featured on-camera monitor. The Cinedeck Extreme can input HD-SDI in 4:2:2 or 4:4:4, as well as HDMI, and record it to the wavelet-based Cineform codec. Coming soon (with a firmware upgrade) will be Avid DNxHD, as well as Uncompressed HD. That’s right — an Uncompressed 12-bit RGB HD recorder for under $12K that sits right on top of your camera. Recording media are consumer 2.5″ SSD drives designed for laptops.

The Cinedeck’s monitor offers functions such as waveform, vectorscope, false-color exposure meter, audio meters, pixel-to-pixel zoom for focus, grid and frameline overlays, etc. All this in a package about the same size of a standard on-board LCD.

Watch the video for more on the Cinedeck Extreme and to see it mounted to the new ARRI ALEXA Digital Cinema camera.

From my perspective, if there were themes to NAB this year, it was 3D and 35PL glass. There were a multitude of 3D rigs on display; some of them quite clever, some rather old school and some, well, shall we say… “logically challenged”.

Then there were a few groundbreaking solutions aimed at the masses. Panasonic showed a concept camera that essentially looked like an HPX170 with binoculars on the front. Affordable HD 3D. Years away from reality, but a sign of things to come. Neat. This camera was a component of a top-to-bottom 3D initiative announced by Panasonic. Here’s the press release.

There were plenty of 3D display systems from other manufacturers as well. Sony showed a very nice 3D LCD panel that attracted quite a crowd.

…continue reading Reflections on NAB 2009