Surviving Post

While I found myself defending Avid’s new pricing scheme , I got to wondering about how people actually decide if something is worth its cost. From conversations I’ve had publicly and privately it is clear that logic has little bearing in most value decisions. Here’s an example:
You shop at Costco because the price is cheaper. You can buy a ton of frozen and canned foods and big bags of fruit less expensively than in the local grocery store. However… if they are large cans, do you end up throwing some away? Do you refrigerate the leftovers which then don’t taste as good on the next pass? Do some of the apples in that big bag begin to decompose before you get to them? Do you really get through all the frozen foods before freezer rot hits them? And how long did you wait in line at Costco vs. your local store? Time is money. And don’t forget the gas.

After returning from NAB last year (2007) I gave Avid 3 years as a significant player in the NLE market. The combination of the major inroads FCP had made, including the announcement of Final Cut Server and the ineptitude shown by the Avid marketing department, converged to create the impression of a grave future. This year’s NAB would mark the shift from 3 to 2 years left in my countdown. So I have been asked by many whether my opinion has changed. Before I answer, let’s take a trip down memory lane to last year.

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.

It is unfortunate that my very first blog entry has to be an obituary. In case you haven’t heard the news, Frank Capria is no longer with us. No, don’t panic, he isn’t pushing up daisies, it’s a little worse than that, he is working for a manufacturer! Of course I’m running with a bit of humor here, but there is also a serious undertone. Frank was one of the guys leading the resistance to push the manufacturers to improve the products and pricing in our market space… and now he’s been absorbed.