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Filed under: Hardware •NAB 08 •

Best NAB find

With Avid and Apple missing from the convention floor, I was hoping this would be a good year to hunt through the little booths and find something new. While I did stumble upon several cool new products, one impressed me more than anything else on the floor. This was a new monitor from a company I had never heard of.

If you have been following the “Death of the CRT” and “What are going to replace it with” threads over the last few years, you are aware of the problem we face. If not, here is a quick summary. LCDs suck for critical monitoring of video! Plasmas are a close call but don’t come in any size smaller than about 40”. So that leaves us with a poor substitute. One company, eCinema has created a monitor that actually solves the lack of blacks in an LCD. But it costs a LOT!

So imagine my surprise when I walked into a little draped off room and spotted three nice looking monitors in a row. The catch was, only the one in the center was a CRT. The other two were examples of a coming technology called Field Emission Technology, or FED for short. This is a variation of the SED technology that we have been waiting for since at least 2004.

The blacks were so black that I couldn’t discern where the letterboxing ended and the black frame began. Looking off-axis, the picture held up all the way to the edge of the screen. That’s 90 degrees off axis! The depth of the monitor was a little more than a standard LCD. And it wasn’t generating any significant heat. Wow!!

Of course trying to get pricing and release date information from the poor guy who seemed to know 25 words of English was an exercise in futility. But I was able to learn from later research that this company is a spin off from Sony who started the work with this technology. I don’t know if this is Sony’s way of trying to avoid getting caught up in the huge lawsuit surrounding the SED technology. And I don’t care. What’s important is that I’ve seen the technology in action and it works!

You can check out the sparse website at Fe-tech-co.

I’ve seen the future, and I finally have hope for monitoring in my world.

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