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Display Review: Panasonic BT-LH2600W

Dec 1, 2006 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Jeff Sauer

New widescreen LCD monitor pairs reference-level quality and professional digital features.

LCDs have displaced CRTs on a lot of desktops over the last several years, but less often in places where image and color quality decisions are made. Despite their attractively thin, space-saving form factors, LCDs have historically had weaker color, marginal gamma levels, poor refresh rates, and even resolution and scaling issues. However, that has changed, and one of the leading examples is Panasonic's BT-LH2600W.

Debuted earlier this year at NAB in April, the BT-LH2600W is Panasonic's second-generation LCD video production monitor and the new sibling of the previously released 17in. BT-LH1700W. Both are aimed squarely at digital content production, and both offer an excellent image with no visible LCD image ghosting. However, the new LH2600 picks up where the LH1700 left off. In addition to picture quality that, arguably, matches or exceeds that of a production-level CRT, it adds helpful features — such as a built-in waveform monitor, side-by-side moving-frame/freeze-frame analysis, and a new pixel-to-pixel mode — that conventional analog monitors just can't offer.

The LH2600 is a native 1366×768, 16:9 panel that features two SDI/HD-SDI auto-sensing inputs and one out, as well as in and loop-through out of all of the following: 3×BNC component (YpbPr, RGB-Video, or RGB-comp), S-Video, BNC composite, and sync. Nine-pin GPI and RS-232 ports offer external control. Reinforcing the fact that this is a production video monitor rather than a computer monitor, there is no standard 15-pin VGA port, and the RGB-comp requires a 4×BNC cable for vertical sync.

There is also a pair of RCAs for stereo audio input and, unlike the LH1700, the LH2600 now supports SDI/HD-SDI embedded audio. Of course, although you can hear sound, the 0.5W built-in stereo speakers are nothing to get too excited about. More impressive are the semi-transparent two-, four-, and eight-level audio meters (which now support HD-SDI embedded audio) that you can toggle on and off at the top of the screen. And superimposed audio meters are just one of the digital features that should make the transition from CRT to LCD more comfortable than you might expect.

In addition to dedicated input select buttons, menu navigation, and dedicated knob controls for brightness, phase, chroma, and contrast/backlight, there are five programmable function buttons on the bottom front panel. You can use these to toggle specific functions, like the audio level meters, on and off.

If you've heard anything about the LH1700 or LH2600, it may be that there's a built-in waveform monitor that you can toggle on and off, and, indeed, it's a nice quality control feature. The default position is down in the lower-right corner of the screen, although you can move it to any of the other three corners, too. You can also overlay a variety of semi-transparent gray markers to help visualize content in different aspect ratios, as well as safe areas.

Of course, old analog monitors often had safe-area markers, too, but they didn't have side-by-side freeze-frame features for scrutinizing colors and image details. On the LH2600, you can freeze an image in the center of the screen, but you can also show a source as a side-by-side split screen. Hit the function toggle button, and the right-side picture freezes, while the left side continues to play the video.

You say you want a resolution

At a native 1366×768, the LH2600 has an obvious math problem showing native 1080 content without scaling, and this was a problem for some LH1700 adopters. Although it wasn't an overt problem, some down-conversion artifacts were visible at certain times. To fix that, the LH2600 now offers pixel-to-pixel mode for HD sources, which allows a scaling-free image.

For 720p sources, the onscreen image simply shrinks to the center 1280×720 pixels, leaving black bars around the edges. 1080i and 1080p sources, on the other hand, are matched pixel-to-pixel by displaying only the inner 1366×768 pixels. Yes, that means the visible image is cropped and you're not seeing the entire image, but it's not a bad trade-off. It lets you see what you need to see if there's any doubt about the image, and a function button (set to pixel-to-pixel) lets you toggle back and forth between that and the full-size image, which looks very good itself.

Not surprisingly, the LH2600 performed very well on the test bench, starting with near-perfect brightness uniformity of greater than 99.4 percent; unheard of for an LCD. Black levels are very good for an LCD monitor and made even better by the ability to select between three gamma presets — Standard, Film, and Studio/Post — and to adjust the brightness of the backlight and chroma levels with the dedicated control knobs on the front panel. Color temperature was also good, particularly with SDI inputs, which made it almost a perfect D65 from black to white. However, I did notice some increased blue levels in the grayscales with analog component inputs that brought the color temperature up as IRE levels went from about 40 down to 0.

Color was as good as I've tested on an LCD monitor, with most primary and secondary colors spot on. Only green (and yellow with analog component input) sneaked a little toward blue, which is surely a fair trade-off for absolutely solid blue on the CIE 1931 reference chart (something you're unlikely to see on any desktop LCD, or even on a consumer LCD TV).

I can quibble a little bit about the menu design of the LH2600, although I'd admit that there's a lot there to organize. However, not all functions can be directly accessed or turned on or off through the menus, and that could be awkward. Instead, functions such as pixel-to-pixel and waveform must first be assigned to one of the five function buttons and toggled on and off from there. On the one hand, that makes sense, but not if you like one of them to be always on and want to save the function buttons for something else.

Admittedly, the path to quality video on LCD screens has been a long one, but momentum has certainly been increasing as LCD TV sales have taken off and provided more R&D dollars. But for those stuck on old LCD stereotypes, it's clearly time to look forward. In fact, Panasonic, along with Sony, is ceasing production of CRT-based reference monitors.

Yes, there will be users out there who swear that CRTs continue to look better than LCDs at any price, but with products such as the BT-LH2600W, those quips increasingly sound more like, “I'm comfortable with what I'm used to.” With more native progressive content to view from more digital sources, and more users viewing programming on digital displays, it only makes sense that digital displays should be used as production references as well, particularly if they're as good as the LH2600.

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bottomline

Company: Panasonic
Secaucus, N.J.; (201) 348-5300
www.panasonic.com

Product: BT-LH2600W

Assets: Excellent color, low refresh time, built-in waveform, adjustable gamma, pixel-to-pixel image display.

Caveats: Menus not terribly intuitive, price reflects the premium on newer technology.

Demographic: Video production, nonlinear editing, color correction.

PRICE: $4,950

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© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.