Extreme TV nerds (hello) sometimes talk about 'mastering' movies and shows, which is the industry term for the look and feel of something created and worked out by the creative team behind it. 'Mastering' monitors are used for this, and are specialized screens designed to be extremely accurate with the image signal coming to them, so that colorists can perfect the look of a film with confidence.
They use slightly different screen technology compared to any of the best TVs you can buy, and they're bulky beasts that are interesting to look at, but you don't tend to look at them much. They have never allowed me to take pictures every time I have been somewhere with them. Well, until recently, when I visited Hisense's TV research and development lab, the company was very happy to show off its professional mastering monitor.
Some companies make mastering monitors, but Sony is probably the most famous for its use in Hollywood. The Hisense one is mainly used in Chinese film and television production, but it uses the same type of technology and is very similar in design to the Sony one.
The first thing you'll notice is what I mentioned before: that it's an incredibly boxy thing, with lovely old-school buttons and controls on the front, including actual dials, which I always love to see in today's technology. They control elements of visual playback, although you generally don't modify them while they're in use: you place them where you want and then play with the look of different digital mastering techniques within your editing/production environment.
The screen measures only about 32 inches, but it's about six inches deep and has two prominent carrying handles on the back. The thickness has to do with heat dissipation – it has small holes throughout the body further back to help with that task.
Why is it so hot? Well, that comes down to the display technology. It is a dual LCD panel with 4K resolution, capable of producing highly nuanced colors and pixel-perfect contrast similar to that of OLED.
It works by placing two layers of LCD panels in front of a powerful and perfectly uniform backlight. To understand why two LCD screens are used, we must return to the problem of black tones on LCD screens and why the best OLED TVs and the best mini-LED TVs with local dimming have become so popular.
LCD TVs work with a light behind the pixels that shines forward. The LCD liquid crystal layer changes this light to other colors, so it looks like it's supposed to. However, liquid crystals cannot reproduce black very well, because black requires the absence of light and crystals cannot completely block backlight.
This is why mini-LED TVs use local dimming, meaning they reduce (or turn off) the backlight so the LCD panel doesn't have to block as much light; OLED avoids the problem by having pixels that generate their own light, meaning each can be dimmed to complete darkness.
Dual LCD displays work by having two sets of LCD pixels on top of each other, and in combination, they can block all the light they need, but can also display much brighter images than OLEDs.
So why don't all LCD TVs use this technology? Because it is devastatingly inefficient. Even ignoring when they are trying To block light, each layer of LCD absorbs a lot of light as it passes through, so these monitors require a lot of power and generate a lot of heat to achieve 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 would want to pay the kind of home energy bill they would rack up either.
That's why the dual LCD screen is used in products like this, where price is not a factor as long as the result is meticulously good. The Hisense reference monitor I saw costs CN¥250,000 (around $35,000 / £28,000), which is a similar price to Sony's reference monitors.
Naturally, you get other specialized pro features for these prices, such as a wide range of inputs and the ability to display multiple images side by side to choose color and contrast grading options or adjust pixel response times.
I always love seeing one of these in action and marveling at how fundamentally similar the technology is to regular TVs, and yet how different the design must be to achieve the extra jump in picture quality that makes them “reference” worthy. “.