Wonderful World of B&W (and Color)
A newcomer to PMA is Totoku North America, the subsidiary of a longtime Japanese manufacturer of electrical products and monitors. The company is taking displays designed for medical imaging applications, and now offering them to the professional content-creating market, including a high-performance CRT system and high-resolution flat panels with color calibration packages.
Attendees got a preview of the company’s LCD lines due in April, including several unique monochrome flat panels aimed at creators of fine art photography. The monochrome models replace the usual color filters found on the front of the panel with a clear material, allowing about three times the usual amount of light to pass through, according to Totoku product manager Joel Ingulsrud.
With the increased luminance comes a higher contrast ratio. “The image looks like a view-camera transparency on a light box,” he said. In addition to the digital-photography market, the company sees museums and art book publishers as potential customers for the monochrome LCDs.
Also due in April are a trio of color LCDs (in descending order of size and resolution): a 20.8-inch flat panel with a resolution of 2,048 by 1,536 pixels; a 20.1-inch model offering 1,600-by-1,200-pixel resolution; and a 18.1-inch model with a 1,280-by-1,024-pixel resolution. The final branding and pricing are to follow.
Content creators will be interested the panel’s optional color calibration package. The company’s homegrown hardware calibrator communicates with special circuitry on the displays, which then control gamma and brightness settings. This adjustment is performed on the panel rather than changing the color lookup table (LUT) on the graphics display card. This is comparable to calibrating the electron guns on a CRT and minimizes the loss of color resolution when picking a gamma setting, Ingulsrud said.
Shipping now is Totoku’s ProCalix, a 21-inch CRT, with a list price of $3,999. According to Ingulsrud, the monitor is a “poor-man’s Barco,” positioned between color calibrated displays sold into the content creation market and the top-of-the-hill Barco systems.
The monitor comes with a hardware calibrator for gun-level calibration. Similar to Barco’s high-end color reference systems, the ProCalix employs Auto Kinetic Bias, a technology that stabilizes the monitor’s black point. Users can also tweak the color and brightness over the entire screen (divided into 25 equal sections), instead of the usual four corners.
A Final Musing
There’s the rub: Quality is seldom cheap, whether from a camera featuring a new sensor technology, or a new black-and-white flat panel display. Only you can determine the value of quality — increased resolution, stable color, reliability, and repeatability — for your workflow.
The recent sage, rabbi Israel Meir Kahan, known as the Chofetz Chaim, offered wisdom that we can apply to this purchasing impasse: “The more money you have, the harder it is to part with it.” Sometimes, investing in color quality may prove to be a tough decision — for those of us with the budget as well as those of us without.
This article was last modified on January 3, 2023
This article was first published on February 28, 2002
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