Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Extreme TV nerds (hello) will sometimes talk about “mastering” movies and shows, which is the industry term for the look of something that’s created and established by the creative team behind it. “Mastering” monitors are the ones that are used for this, and they are specialized screens that are designed to be extremely accurate to the signal of the images that come into them, so that the colors can perfect the appearance of a movie with trust
They use a slightly different screen technology compared to any other the best TVs you can buy them, and they are bulky beasts that are interesting to look at – but you don’t tend to get to look at them much. I was never allowed to take pictures whenever I was somewhere with them. Well, until recently, when I visited HisenseTV’s R&D lab, and the company was quite happy to show off its pro mastering monitor.
A few companies make mastering monitors, but Sony it is probably most famous for its use in Hollywood. Hisense is mainly used in Chinese film and TV production, but it uses the same type of technology and is very similar to Sony in design.
The first thing you’ll notice is what I mentioned earlier – that it’s one hell of a boxy thing, with charming old-school buttons and controls on the front, including real dials, which I always love to see on tech. today. They control elements of the visual reproduction, even if you don’t have them in general during use – you take them where you want, then play with the look of different digital mastering techniques in your editing / production environment .
The screen is only about 32 inches, but it’s about six inches deep and has two prominent carrying handles on the back. The thickness is all about heat dissipation – it has small holes all over the body further back to help with that task.
Why is it so hot? Well, this comes down to screen technology. This is a 4K dual-LCD resolution panel, capable of producing very nuanced colors and OLED-like pixel perfect contrast.
It works by putting two layers of LCD panel in front of a powerful and perfectly even backlight. To understand why two LCD screens are used, we need to return to the problem with black tones in LCD, and why the the best OLED TVs and the the best mini LED TVs with local dimming have become so popular.
LCD TVs work by having a light behind the pixels that shine forward. The liquid crystal LCD layer changes this light into other colors, so it looks like it should. However, liquid crystals cannot make black very well, because black requires the absence of light, and crystals are not able to completely block the backlight.
This is why mini-LED TVs use local dimming, that is to say they turn their backlight (or off) so that the LCD panel does not have to block so much light; OLED avoids the problem by having pixels that generate their own light, meaning that each one can be dimmed to total blackness.
Dual-LCD screens work by having two sets of LCD pixels on top of each other, and in combination, they are able to block all the light they need – but they can also potentially show much brighter images than OLEDs.
So why don’t all LCD TVs use this technology? Because it is devastatingly ineffective. Even ignoring when they are try to block light, each LCD layer absorbs a lot of light as it passes through anyway, so these monitors require a huge amount of power, and generate a huge amount of heat, to hit the same kind of brightness numbers as a mini-LED. TV.
Hence the thickness of these monitors, full of bright lights and, therefore, heat sinks to prevent them from melting – but no one wanted to pay the kind of home energy bill they would accumulate.
So the dual-LCD is implemented in products like this, where the price is not a factor as long as the result is meticulously good. The Hisense reference monitor I saw costs CN¥250,000 (about $35,000/£28,000), which is kind of similar in price to Sony’s reference monitors.
Naturally, you get some other pro-specialist features for these prices, such as a wide range of inputs, and the ability to show multiple images to each other to choose color and contrast grading options or to adjust pixel response times.
I always like to see one of these in action and wonder to how similar to regular televisions the technology is fundamentally, and also how different the design must be to reach the extra picture quality leap that makes them worthy of “reference”.
