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Filed under: Hardware •Post Production •Production •

Review: Panasonic BT-LH1760 17” LCD Monitor

Panasonic BT-LH1760, showing cross hatch, WFM, VITC, audio meters at the top, and 90% safe area marker with half-shaded background.

The $4500 Panasonic BT-LH1760 is a 17 inch, 1280x768 video monitor with multiple analog and digital inputs and a 100/120 Hz refresh rate for crisp motion rendering. It displays NTSC, PAL, 720p, and 1080i/p signals in both analog and digital, and offers a high-resolution waveform monitor for all video inputs, as well as a vectorscope, timecode, and audio level monitors for SDI inputs. It also has a wide selection of aspect ratio and safe-area markers available.

Panasonic’s earlier BT-LH1700W monitor, which remains in the lineup at $3400, has a reputation for robustness, reliability, and a good picture (though some say it’s a bit on the greenish side). The BT-LH1760 builds on the 1700’s strengths, adding a faster LCD with better motion rendering, color, and off-axis viewing; pixel-for-pixel unscaled viewing; embedded SDI audio decoding and display; twice the detail in its WFM; SDI vectorscope and timecode readout; and five programmable function buttons. The 1760 loses the 1700W’s Y/C (S-Video) input but gains DVI-D in its place, making computer connections easier.

Design

The BT-LH1760 is a compact, flat panel in a sturdy metal case. It’s about 17 inches wide, a bit under 13” tall, and just over 3 inches deep. It weighs about 13.5 pounds. If you include the metal stand it ships with, the depth increases to 8 inches, and the weight increases to 15.5 pounds.

1760, showing cross-hatching, audio metering, 93% safe area, WFM, and VITC.

The case is finished in a slightly rough paint with a subtle metalflake sparkle. The textured surface provides good non-slip traction when picking up the monitor while the dark gray color doesn’t distract from the picture. The texture also reduces problems with reflections.

The panel itself has a slightly semi-matte finish: not as flat and light-diffusing as a pure matte, so blacks stay dark and rich; yet not as reflective as a glossy screen, so reflections aren’t distracting. I find it a very usable compromise that works well in a variety of indoor and outdoor situations. Panasonic offers both an acrylic protective cover and a glare hood as optional accessories.

 

A small white window in the top of the frame covers red and green tally-light LEDs, which can be illuminated via GPI closures, just as on the 1700. Turning both tallies on lights up the window in orange.

Controls reside below the panel, including the push-on, push-off power switch; input selectors for composite, SDI1, SDI 2, component, and DVI; menu and function buttons, and rotary controls for phase, chroma, brightness, contrast/backlight, and volume.

The 1760’s front panel controls.

Four buttons—menu, up, down, and enter—handle menu navigation, while two buttons are dedicated to user-programmable functions, just like the 1700. However, when menus aren’t displayed, the three rightmost menu buttons are also function buttons, so you can program five different operations for recall directly from the front panel—a great improvement over the 1700.

The rotary picture controls need to be pressed in to engage them, so inadvertent twiddles don’t screw up your calibration. A yellow LED lights up for each control set to a non-standard position.

Small speakers are housed on either side of the controls; they’re confidence-monitoring quality, not hi-fi, but they work fine for their intended purpose. If you’re pickier about sound, there’s a stereo minijack on the back for headphones.

The 1760’s backside offers VESA mount attachment points and an array of connectors.

The backside of a 1760.

Unlike the 1700, there is no fan vent on the 1760 (and no fan); indeed, there seem to be no cooling vents of any sort—not that they’re needed; the monitor runs cool to the touch. Also missing is the cover plate for an SDI embedded audio option: the 1760 comes with embedded audio decoding as standard equipment. The right side of the rear panel has an IEC power input (auto-switching), while a sliding cover above it exposes a 4-pin power connector for battery operation (the cover allows either AC or DC to be connected, but not both simultaneously). The 1760 ships with a heavy-duty grounded power cable with a right-angle plug at the monitor end, so the cable lies flat against the back panel.

The 1760’s rear panel connectors.

The monitor has two SDI / HD-SDI inputs, with a switched SDI output that passes through whichever SDI signal is selected. There are also loop-through connectors for composite and component video; the latter may be RGB or YPrPb (YUV). The 1760 can use sync-on-green (or sync-on-Y) for its component input, or separate sync, or even separated H and V drive signals, making it compatible with just about every bit of component analog gear in the world.

There’s a DVI-D connector for either computer or video connections, a headphone jack for critical audio monitoring, and two-channel analog audio inputs using RCA jacks. Two DB9 connectors provide remote control: one is a set of GPI inputs, while the other is RS-232 serial control. 

Compared to the 1700, the 1760 adds the DVI-D and headphone jacks, but it offers no Y/C connection. I mourn the loss; I far prefer Y/C monitoring to composite monitoring with all of composite’s cross-color and cross-luma artifacts. Still, life moves on; fewer cameras these days ship with Y/C outputs standard, or with the necessary cabling (I won’t mention Sony by name, but you can assume whatever you want, grin), and the added versatility of the DVI-D connection and the headphone jack is a big win.

The monitor ships with a fixed metal stand, which holds the 1760 bolt upright, perpendicular to the surface it’s placed on.

1760 side view, with HVX200 for scale.

The stand has no adjustability whatsoever, and many people remove it in favor of more flexible arrangements. I really like the Porta-Brace MO-LH1700 soft case, while some folks recommend the VFGadgets LCD Light Stand Mount. Having said that, I’ve never seen fit to remove the identical stand from my 1700; it works well for what it is, and it’s strong and stable.

Still, my 1700 is the only one I’ve seen in the field with its stand still attached, and I do miss the ability to tilt the monitor (to be fair, Panasonic offers the $250 BT-STAND desktop stand; it may offer adjustability, but I can’t find any more info or images of it; it’s not even listed in Panasonic’s LCD monitors line-up catalog, and I’ve never seen one in the field that I know of).

The monitor may also be rack-mounted.

Controls, Menus, Onscreen Indications

Pushbuttons select any of the five inputs, and each one has a green tally LED to indicate selection. By default, the current input setting is displayed onscreen for 3 seconds, but you can set it to be on all the time, or off all the time, too.

Four menu keys drive the menu system in the usual manner: Enter to select, Up and Down to navigate, Menu to back up a level. Rather than describe the menus in detail, I’ll simply hit the highlights; you can download the full operating manual directly via FTP.

• Display standard-def images as 4:3 or 16:9.
• Turn on markers for 4:3, 14:9, Cinemascope, or other aspect ratios, as well as a cross-hatch grid (shown in most of the photos), a center marker, and several different safe areas. Areas outside the safe areas or aspect-ratio markers can be shown at full or half intensity.
• Choose D56, D65, D93, or user-selected white points.
• Vary R,G, and B gains and biases.
• Choose between SMPTE-C, EBU, and ITU-709 color spaces.
• Choose where to position the menus, and choose which corner to display the WFM and vectorscope in.
• Program which functions are triggered by the five programmable function keys and the eight GPI inputs.
• Set the pixel-for-pixel area displayed from a 1080-line image: the center of the picture, or any of the four corners.
• Choose normal gamma, a gamma for viewing Varicam Film Rec. images, or a “studio/pst” setting to emphasize colors (“a mode that approximates CRT display capability suitable for studio or postproduction application”; I didn’t see this being noticeably different from the normal gamma setting).
• Vary H and V sharpness (image-enhancement) levels and edge thicknesses.
• Choose between inter-field and inter-frame modes of interlaced-to-progressive conversion. In inter-field mode, a paused interlaced image will show both fields onscreen, with interlaced combing visible; in inter-frame mode, the fields are interpolated to remove the combing artifacts, but a freeze-frame will flicker at the field rate. Both look equally sharp to my eye on moving video, though Panasonic recommends inter-frame mode for fast-moving subjects; I find inter-frame mode is slightly softer vertically.
• Choose which two embedded audio channels to monitor.
• Display audio bar graphs for 2, 4, or 8 embedded audio channels.
• Display an onscreen WFM (waveform monitor, all inputs) or vectorscope (SDI inputs only).
• Select vectorscope scale and magnification level (SDI inputs only).
• Select side-by-side display mode: full-height center cuts, or full-width images, shrunk to fit. The 1760, like the 1700, can freeze an input, then show another live input of the same scanning format side-by-side with it.
• Show / hide closed captioning (NTSC composite inputs only).
• Show LTC or VITC, TC or user bits (embedded SDI inputs only).

There’s a lot going on here; fortunately, you don’t need to dive into the menus every time you want to use a feature. Most of the things you’d change on a daily basis can be assigned to one of the five function keys or eight GPI triggers.

The function keys are a step above those on the 1700 in two ways: first, there are five of them instead of two; second, when pressed, each function key briefly displays what it and its brethren are set up to do:

Pushing a softkey shows what functions are assigned as well as performing a function.

With the 1700, I normally have the two function buttons set up to switch SD scanning between 4:3 and 16:9, and to display the WFM, but this leaves other useful things—blue-only, H/V delay (pulse-cross), and marker on/off—accessible only through the menus. The 1760 lets me set all of these on functions keys at the same time; ironically, though, the 1760 now has more things I want on a single keypress, like pixel-for-pixel mode, timecode and audio overlays, and the cross-hatch grid! Still, five direct-access functions is a lot better than two.

Next: Performance and Conclusions…

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I wasn’t that impressed by this monitor considering that it doesn’t have at least 1920x1080 pixels.  If you need to QC 1080i material, the lack of resolution and scaling artifacts on top of that would make this a poor buy.  Ditto for monitoring any 1080 camera.

At the same or lower price point you can get a >=1920x1080 broadcast LCD.

2- Motion still doesn’t look perfect with 120hz.  (Though this stuff is subtle.)
It would be worth checking if black frame insertion cuts black level in half.

Posted by GlennChan  on  08/21  at  04:00 PM

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One thing not mentioned in the article is the inability to show waveform or vectorscope when in 1080p mode.

Will that maybe come in a firmwareupdate?
And how to get such a firmware update?

Posted by Christer Molander  on  12/17  at  01:44 AM

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I didn’t have any 1080p cameras to test with, only 1080PsF, so I’m not surprised I didn’t notice this!

Check with your dealer or local Panasonic rep regarding firmware updates. I haven’t heard of any but that doesn’t mean that none exist.

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  12/17  at  09:06 AM

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No that thing is not covered in the brochure either. Deep down in the manual it is.
We do most dramaproduction in 1080p/25.
I´ve come up with a workaround. Using for example an Aja IoHD you can put out a converted 720p signal on either of the SDI connectors (the monitor is as you said 720p) and that gave me the WFM.

Thanks for a good review.

/Christer

Posted by Christer Molander  on  12/17  at  03:33 PM

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