Possibilities
May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
One of the best things about NAB is the unexpected: when you see something that nails a market need on the head, models the near future, or hints that part of the longtime status quo is about to change.
In my experience, the unexpected can truly come from nowhere — like the year Reflecmedia debuted its LiteRing and transformed the blue-/greenscreen market. The small players can deliver big changes sometimes. So can the big players — like the year Panasonic introduced P2 and moved the horizon. This time, for me, it was another big company, HP, that provided the shot across the bow of possibility at NAB. Nothing so dramatic as a new format — instead, this was one of those unexpected changes that potentially ripples out to affect content-creation culture.
In short, the news is that HP is coming out with a reference monitor (PC- and Mac-compatible), aimed not at but, well, over the shoulder of the Apple Cinema Display and squarely at the reference-monitor standards set by CRTs. But HP is onto something far, far more ambitious under the hood of this latest monitor. No one who is aware of HP's longstanding technology relationship with DreamWorks needs to wonder where the DreamColor monitor incubated.
HP's VP and Worldwide Marketing Manager, Global Workstation Business Unit Jim Zafarana says that about a year ago, DreamWorks' Ed Leonard and Jeffrey Katzenberg asked HP to tackle the challenge of color-critical monitors. DreamWorks was aspiring to 10-bit CRT-style dense blacks, improved white chromacity, and the kind of calibratable color fidelity across multiple color spaces that the volume LCD market cannot deliver, and that the current reference monitor market can do only at great cost
The monitor is set to debut next month, and that's when the other shoe will drop: price. At the NAB news conference, the math was “1/4 the price.” You could say, “1/4 of what? A $25,000 reference monitor? A $17,000 17in. monitor? Or 1/4 of something even more disruptive?” My sense is that HP intends to significantly change the current technical and economic equation — and not just for the good folks at DreamWorks.
If this is true, the HP DreamColor monitor's impact will of course be economic. But more importantly may be its aesthetic — even cultural — impact. In an industry that runs on creativity and feedback, a good monitor is a luxury, the way a good pair of reference speakers make all the hard work worthwhile for that moment when artists know, “Yeah, we got it.” The prospect that more people up and down the chain of production could have access to that experience — at their desks and in their workshops — welcomes more collaborators into a more intimate relationship with the work. We'll see what the possibilities turn out to be.
