The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP006: Getting To Know QD-OLED with Bram Desmet

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

After 20+ years of using CRT, LCD/LED, Plasma, RGB OLED, W-RGB OLED, LMCL, and probably a few other display technologies we're forgetting about - Is QD OLED (Quantum Dot OLED) the display technology we've all been waiting for? In this installment of The Offset Podcast, Robbie & Joey sit down with our good friend, display technology guru, and CEO of Flanders Scientific, Bram Desmet to discuss if quantum physics actually has anything to do with this display technology, the massive improvements that QD OLED provides over other display tech and some key features of QD OLED that you'll want to consider before your next reference monitor purchase.

Hey there, welcome back to another installment of the Offset podcast. And today, we're taking a look at QD OLED, a display technology that's taking the industry by storm. This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. All right, Joey, today we are talking about something that is near and dear to the old colorist heart. That is quantum physics. Quantum physics, exactly.

Display technologies, right? It seems like all we ever do talk about Ruminate on is what the latest and greatest display technology is for reference monitors. Because, right, after all, reference monitors are, you know, the sword, if you will, of the colorist. I often tell people, right, that, you know, trust is what a colorist does, right? And if you can't trust the monitor that you're looking at to make creative decisions and technical decisions, well, then you have nothing. And, you know, so therefore the reference monitor is something that we're constantly taking a look at, looking at technologies, how they're developing, you know, obviously cost players in there. But we always want the best. We want no compromises, you know, if possible.

And, you know, I would say over the past 20 years, I mean, you and I have, what, probably six. pretty much every major display technology out there. I was thinking back before recording this today, and I was thinking about the very first really expensive piece of gear that I owned, and it was probably right around 2001, something like that, I had purchased a Sony BVM CRT, the 31 or 32 inch CRT, that was basically, I don't know, the size of like a small, like a Hugo, right?

I mean, the thing probably weighed 450 pounds too. I bought that used, which in hindsight was probably stupid because CRTs, you know, they go wacky pretty quick. But that was my first. I was on CRT, then made the move to LCD and the 4,000 flavors of LCD. Then eventually to OLED and all the various flavors of that. You've had a similar path, yeah? Yeah, you know, I started out with the BVM CRTs because back in the CRT days, that was kind of the name of the game. right, that was the broadcast standard.

They had these simply blessed boxers in their CRTs, and everybody used them. So, you know, they were by default, not just the reference because of the performance, but because everybody else was using them as well. You could get, you could get, go to one shop or whatever, you had a fighting chance that it would look more or less the same. Of course, back then, CRT days, calibration was like, you know, an engineer walking in the room, putting up some color bars and going, yeah, that looks right. You know, it was extremely basic.

So having everybody on the same technology was a simplifying factor. Then CRTs went away because of various environmental factors and manufacturing factors made them not a viable business model anymore. And everybody immediately stopped making them. Yep. Then LCDs came on the scene. There were many LCDs claiming to be CRT replacements in the initial kind of, adoption of that.

A lot of them weren't, but they were close, and they got better and better and better. And right when they were getting kind of to the level of perfect, RGB top emission Oleds came out and blew everyone's faces off for SDR. And we all moved in that direction. They had incredible performance,

but then HDR technology comes along and has its own set of requirements that the RGB OLEDs can't, just can't do. Yeah. So they kind of go away and various different technologies, which I'm sure we'll talk about, come in to fill that gap.

I'm skipping plasma because I never got into the, using consumer plasmas for reference, but that was a thing for a long time as well. Plasmas were my jam. I love this. But, yeah, so I mean, the technology has evolved and evolved and evolved, and we've kind of seen all of it

from the beginning to now we're looking at what I think, and I think you agree, is kind of the foreseeable future of reference display technology, which is the QD OLED or a quantum dot OLED display. Totally. And it's been a magical mystery tour of displays over the years. And for anybody who knows me and Joey, you know me well, that I'm on this constant path of trying to find perfection. And I have to be reminded by industry peers and friends, you amongst them, but you,

you're a little bit more of an enabler than most people. And that is, you know, perfection is not something that can be attained. But QD OLED, you know, we first started hearing about quantum dots. I did anyway, probably back in 2014, 2015, somewhere in that range. And they really came into our workflows recently when Flanders Scientific, who are good friends of our, sponsors of the podcast, introduced a line of QD OLED panels themselves, But you know what? I think that, you know, instead of you and I blabbing about QD OLED and the display trajectory that we've taken over the past 20 years, we should phone a friend, I think is what we should do. And we just so happen to have on the line ready for answer questions, hard quantum physics questions. We have Brom Desmond from Flanders Scientific. Bram is the general manager. And head honcho over at FSI. Bram, welcome to the offset podcast. Thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate it.

Brom, over the past 20 or so years, has been a very good friend, and whether he likes or not, a technical resource slash manual for everything display-related and calibration-related for Joey and I. He is amazingly generous with his time answering questions from the mundane to the technical, and don't let him kid you, even though he likes watching Formula One and going out into the way. and camping with his family. He is a geek at heart and does love talking about displays. So we're going to, for the next half an hour, 40 minutes or so, we're going to sort of dig into that.

So, Bram, thanks again for being here. And, you know, the first thing I kind of want to, you know, ask you about or sort of as a discussion starter here is how did we get here, right? QDOLA is this new thing that everybody's, you know, hot to trot about and we'll talk about that in depth. But from your perspective, what has, you know, the past 15, 20 years look like in sort of, you know, running a display company, but also, you know, what you know from kind of in the display industry, where, what has the trajectory been and what is it, you know, kind of how do we arrive at QD OLED and what that's about? Sure, yeah. I mean, the best I could describe the display industry as a whole besides Flander's scientific, although we've certainly been a. part or a victim of that is fits and starts, right? So like, there's always this new stuff on the horizon. It seems like it lasts for a few years and then the technology goes away for whatever,

typically commercial reasons more than anything. And so things are made kind of for our very niche industry. And that's such a big part of the problem is that it's such a niche industry, right? And you guys know this. I mean, a lot of these display technologies that we fall in love with, even though Joey wasn't a fan of plasma, people love plasmas. A lot of people thought those were suitable replacement for CRTs. But time after time, kind of the leading display technology for our professional world has gone away

because it just didn't have a broad enough market outside of our world. And so if you'd ask me five years ago, will OLED be the reference technology? I would have told you you were crazy because we were still looking at RGB OLED and then some W-O-Leds coming to the market and W-O-Led was kind of a halfway technology. It was good for SDR, but it wasn't great for HDR. And the path forward looked like, hey, people really need bright HDR displays. That's probably not going to happen with missive displays given all the restrictions we had with the materials and what they could do.

But quantum.com really flipped that on its head. it's enabled HDR OLEDs. So we get all the things that we love about OLEDs, and we get it in a performance factor that works for HDR and beautifully that has huge markets outside of our industry. So it's the first time that I feel like we're kind of closed loop in the ecosystem in a way that we just haven't been before. And that's the thing I'm most excited about is that, you know,

I can get a QD OLED display, for a computer monitor. I can get a QD OLED reference monitor in a small and a big size. Guys on set can use QDO led monitors. Directors can see stuff on QDO led monitors and then producers can watch stuff at home on a QDOLED TV.

And it's, you know, you're talking about that consistency with CRTs back in the day, but most consumer TVs weren't MTC phosphors, right? So they were using cheaper phosphors sets. So this is like as closed loop as this ecosystem has ever gotten. And I think that's really good for creatives

because it gives you the best chance of stuff just looking the same everywhere. Yeah, because at the same time, right, we have new absolute standards like PQ with standardized tone mapping like Dolby Vision. So on the transmission and playback side, we are also now closing that loop with the consumer where what we're actually sending them

goes through less nonsense before it hits their screen. And now their screen can also be of a caliber that it can really reproduce what we're doing here. I think right now it's safe to say we are the closest on the aggregate of most of the audience seeing something comparable to what we saw in the mastering suite. Yeah, no, I agree with that.

I agree with that. Now, guys, to me, I don't know. I know both of you are much more knowledgeable about the technical side of this than I am, but I remember the first time that I heard quantum dots and I was like, oh, okay, so I know what happened here, right? went to some marketing guy and said, hey, man, we got this cool new technology, but we don't know what to call it. And the marketing guy was like, hmm, how about quantum? Oh, quantum. Yeah, exactly.

All right. So let's start there. Quantum dots. Is this a, is this a marketing thing only, right? Or does this have some base in reality? Because when I hear quantum, I think, you know, quantum physics, science fiction, quantum entanglement. Is my monitor going to be quantum entangled with Joey's monitor at home and they show the same thing? Like, what's going on? Why do we call this quantum dots

and what's like, how does quantum dots work? So the really cool thing about this is that it is actually not marketing BS. Like this really, this term quantum is actually used appropriately. And so the basic premise behind it, right, is that quantum dots are essentially really, really small semiconductors. And the size is the key thing here.

They are so tiny that their behavior is really governed by quantum mechanics. Quantum dots are like usually between two, maybe one and 10 nanometers in size, right? The ones we use usually between two and seven nanometers in size. You're talking like 1,000th the width of a human hair, right? It's only a few times bigger than a strand of DNA. When we talk about the term quantum, right, the term quantum specifically refers to a size, not a realm, right? Quantum mechanics refers to the interaction of subatomic particles, as in particles smaller than the atom. So we are dealing with incredibly small scale.

And the cool thing is that the physics changes at that scale, right? Everything above that, we think of it as like Newtonian physics, right? Like opposite but equal reaction. You hit the ball, the ball moves, right? In the quantum world, things behave very differently. And that's where the QD OLED or the quantum dots in the OLED get their little magical ability to do what they do, which is change color of light. Yeah. And so what's interesting about this to me is that as I started researching it,

you know, and trying to wrap my head around the technical part about this, you know, that subatomic atomic size, you know, scale is pretty magical. And what I, correct me if I'm wrong guys, but quantum dots, basically the, the size of that dot, or in other words, how many atoms are kind of bound together in any given configuration also determine what the color is going to be emitted by that collection of dots. Is that correct? You're right about the size, Robbie, and that the nanocrystals for like the red and the green are exactly the same material. It's just the size that makes it different. So you have, for example, green is about like around three nanometers in size as the size of that quantum dot material.

And then for red light, usually around six or seven nanometers in size. Light is, you know, photons are both a wave and a particle, right? So we're conveying energy in with these particles and these waves, and they're coming out as particles and waves, but of a different wavelength. What I think is really cool about this, not to get too deep into the quantum physics aspect, but the second this hit, I was like, oh, I love physics.

I'm going to get on Wikipedia overnight and just read all of it. And I'm sure we'll have somebody in the comments that knows more than me, but my general understanding of this is that at that small scale, right, just like an electron can only occupy certain energy levels. There's no smooth movement between certain energy levels. Bron, like you said, quantization is discrete levels. So the photons at their scale can only occupy certain spaces, right? They can't be a gradient.

So when you force them through a pipe of a certain width, something called quantum confinement happens, where they restructure themselves in those, finite areas corresponding to the size of the medium they're going through, and that equates a new wavelength. So you come in as blue, which is a very short wavelength, and you go out as a longer wavelength, different wavelength, whatever the scale is of the quantum dot material you're going through. You start with a light source that's a blue OLED material, and then that goes to a quantum dot color conversion layer. And those quantum dots, it's not a film, right? They're actually

inkjet printed into place over that blue OLED material. Now, because you're starting with blue light, you don't have to make blue light, right? So the blue just passes through. But then for red and green, that light from the blue OLED is absorbed and then re-emitted at a different wavelength like we're talking about. So you do have fully 100% to 0% dimming on a pixel level for red, green, and blue. So essentially, it has all the capability you would get out of a full emissive RGB OLED display. because we can use these quantum dots to convert colors, not filter colors.

Whereas an LCD, we're filtering out the colors we don't want. Here, we're only emitting the colors we do want. And I think that is what leads to some of the incredible performance we're seeing with these displays. So, I mean, Brom, could you tell us a little bit about, you know, why this particular display technology is such a high performer in both SDR, HDR, and the metrics we're using to kind of look at these displays. and say, okay, this really ticks all the boxes, right? We're not compromising for HDR anymore.

A lot of colors fell in love with RGB LEDs, right? Because it's kind of like no nonsense, great SDR, great black levels, good uniformity, good off-axis viewing. Because it's per pixel light emission, you don't have the full array local dimming type artifacts or other LCD type issues. So it really is simple in a way, because if you want to get the best performance,

you want typically in a missive display where each pixel is individually governed, and if you want black, it can be turned completely off. So that's great. The problem was making it brighter. So with quantum.0 leads, we're just able to take this kind of same thing that we've all loved about our SDR, RGB OLEDs,

and we've been able to transform that into technology that does HDR really, really well. And that's another kind of cool thing that I like about technology is that a lot of HDR displays are good at being HDR, but they're kind of, when you put them in SDR, people like Robbie are like, it kind of preferred the old DM250 to be honest.

Yeah, yeah. But with a quantum.Oled, like, people are like, yeah, hey, this is the SDR experience I've always wanted and loved, and now I can do HDR too. I think that's kind of the most beautiful thing about it. So it strikes me looking at like images of like the, I don't know what the word for it with,

the layer stack or the back plane of these monitors, right? It also strikes me that when you compare traditional LCD designs, valid designs to QD OLED, there's a lot less going on there in terms of the actual stack. So I'm not a physicist, but it would seem like you have a lot less loss, you know, a lot less loss of light and kind of filtering going on and potential places where

there are, you know, additive mistakes made to that stack. that, you know, reduced performance? Is that a, I know that's a simplified way of saying it, but like, Yeah, you're 100%. I mean, the stack is smaller. The stack is stupidly simple. You have an oxide back plane that drives the EL OLED material,

and that ELO lead material then excites the quantum dot material, and you're done. So you're not going through complex panel stacks. I mean, the most complex panel stack is probably the W-O-LED, right? So W-O-Leds, like the amount of transistors in a W-O-Lad is kind of insane. It's like, it's just so complex in terms of the, just the amount of stuff that's going on there. And that's what makes it inefficient. And that's the other thing about QDOL is like, why do they do HDR well?

But because there's not a bunch of crap to go through. Right, right, right, right. It strikes me to talking about WOL, let's stop there for a second, because for, I don't know, maybe almost going on 10 years, it seemed like W.OLED was like the hope of the industry, right? You know, the term LG OLED has kind of become like Kleenex and tissue, right? Everybody's just sort of like, okay, well, we know we have an OLED on the wall, and all the times we're referring to W-O-O-L-Lead. And, you know, my experience with them initially was, wow, they look beautiful.

They're painting the ass to calibrate, but they look beautiful. And that progressed over the years to where, like, man, these things can get pretty darn perfect in an SDR. But when we started transitioning into over to HDR, it seemed like we had this big, divide happen, right? People who were like, well, no, I've bought this reference monitor and it's good enough. And then you had people like, you know, Joey and a little bit yourself and like, yeah, it's cool. But there's, there's some problems. And let's talk about volumetric collapse because I think that's something that a lot of people really don't, really don't grasp all that well. And it's,

it is one of the things that QDO led really a big issue that QDOled solves, right, compared to WRGB OLEDs. What is volumetric collapsed and why were we seeing it on WOLEDs? Why is it a non-issue on QD OLEDs? Yeah. So display color volume collapse is kind of the terminology I've been encouraged to use by some of my color scientists friends. And so normally, you know, we represent colors out of grading systems. Everything over the wire essentially ends up being red, green, blue, right? And red, green, and blue combined give us white light. But with a WRGB, you don't really, really have that, right? So you have four sub-pixels in that white, you often hear it referred to as a boost, right? But it's not just a boost. If you look at the way that most W-O-Leds are driven, you never

drive all four sub-pixels at the same time, typically. You typically do a combination of red and green plus white, or blue and red plus white, or some sort of combination like that. And for SDR, you can make that mimic an additive system, even though even at SDR levels, it's not truly behaving in an additive way, but you can mimic that behavior. But in HDR, you can't. And all that simply means is if you've got a display that does 1,000 nits, you should be able to do the green component of that's going to be the brightest thing, right? So you add literally your green, red and blue channels together,

and the luminance of all of those pegged at 100 percent should give you the peak white if you add up all the luminance values. And what ends up happening is that a thousand-knit display should be able to do well over 600 nits, but a lot of these early W.O.L.s were maybe doing 200, 250 Nets. And so the reason it gives a pleasing experience for the home and with tone mapping employed and sorts of things like that, is that, you know, a lot of those bright speculars do happen on the kind of along that neutral access, right?

So like a bright headlight, a street light. It's relatively white. Where you get killed on those is, you know, a bright neon green sign, you know, bright red neon green sign, a bright grass fields. Exactly. Exactly. So these, you know, maybe not as natural colors, but things that do happen in content. And when you see one of those on a display that has display color volume collapse versus one that doesn't, it is pretty striking. You know, you get that beautiful red sports car that just looks flat for some reason when it's out in sunlight.

And so with a truly additive system, you don't have that. And most systems, most display systems, LCDs, QD OLEDs, RGB LEDs are all. additive. The problem with it is you don't know everything looks normal to you until you see it on a display that is additive. Yeah. That's those code values. Oh, well, what did I do? That's kind of like the insidious thing about this, right? Because I've gotten into this argument with colorists all over the world. It's like, no, I have my LG OLED. Mine is the good one. I have the whatever somebody said was the right one to get. And somebody came and calibrated it. I can master HDR on it. And you can make a beautiful HDR image on it. Yes, because the failure mode of that

volumetric collapse is very pleasing to the eye. But it's to go white too, right? Like those highlights just become neutral and kind of white. It looks filmic almost. It's beautiful. That's why they're great client or sorry, they're great, you know, just TVs. HDR content looks beautiful on a WOLED, just watching it as a viewer. What concerns me as a colorist, like Robbie, you said earlier, you knowing the actual truth of the image is our job, right? So if there are wide swaths of color in the HDR signal that you just can't see on this display, you can't master with it because, okay, you could have hot pink highlights and never know and think I did the greatest grade in the world, and then you play it back on a display that

has a full HDR color volume and your highlights are hot paint. You would have never known. It's funny because we, as Joey said, we've had this discussion, and sometimes varying into arguments with people for for years. And like, this is BS. Like that doesn't happen. You're an elitist. You're a snob.

There was so much. Like you said, there was so much hope around the LG OLEDs for the industry that people got really emotionally attached to them being the be all end all. And they do not like hearing. Especially at the price, right? They didn't want to hear it. And it was funny because, you know, Joey and I have been, you know,

evangelizing this issue for a long time. And it's one of those things where people, like, they just have to see it, you know, side by side. But I want to pay you a particular credit, Bram, and the FSI, you know, design and marketing team for this as well, because you guys came up, and we'll include this in the show notes for the show, right? But you guys came up with this, I think, just perfect explanation graphic that shows, okay, here's red, green, and blue on a W or GRR OLED,

and this is what they're hitting NIT value-wise, and this is what it is on the QD-O-Led, and you suddenly go, oh, that's what it means by volume metric collapse, that my red is not this red. It's kind of a maroon, darkish kind of thing, or my green or my blue or whatever. And that really, that really dials at home.

I don't want to poo W-R-GB OLEDs in general, because one thing I think they have done for post- production, color grading industries on a whole, is that they've opened the door for a lot more people to get really much better images in general, right? They've been able to see things that look much better, UHD size, whatever, right? But with that said, I think that the arguments for WRGB OLED as mastering do have problems as we've explained. Now, another thing that kind of strikes me and going back to the panel stack kind of thing, right?

One thing that I've always been super sensitive to with reference monitors is viewing the angle, right? One of the stopgap technologies that appeared a number of years ago was the LMCL technology, right, where we were kind of, not we, but the industry was kind of stacking LCD planes on top of each other and, you know, making these great LCDs that, had OLED-like performance in terms of black, but I don't know, man. I don't know if you've had the same experience. They look great when you are perfectly dead on to the monitor, right? But you go a little bit off.

They start warping color and changing contrast. And I've actually found the same thing with the WRGB OLEDs to a lesser extent. You know, in our main review suite, we have a big, you know, WRGB OLED in the front. And if you're not, you know, in that cone of, you know, a few, you know, a few degrees off center, it does change a little bit. It seems like maybe this is a placebo effect, but it seems like QD OLED has really kind of fixed that problem to a large degree. And I'm wondering if it is a byproduct of that much less complicated, you know,

layer stack within the panel. Yeah, I mean, that's a huge part of it. So what, you know, the panel manufacturers who make the, or the panel manufacturer who makes the QDO led panels will tell you is that if you look at the light dispersion from those is truly kind of dome-shaped, very what they call Lambertian, right? So it is really even and just super subtle fall off. That's really not very specific.

So like at 60 degrees off-axis, which is hugely off-axis to the display, right? These things still have over 80% of the luminance you have when you're standing straight in front of the display. All these people put these big displays in as client review displays, right? because that's what clients were starting to expect. And the problem was that, you know, trying to get a client to sit where you want them is the easiest thing.

You guys would know this better than I would. Here's your mark. Right. Here's your mark. Exactly. It's like, here, there's an X here. You have to stay there. It's one of those things you are like, as a monitor customer, right?

As somebody's shopping for a reference monitor, you might think, okay, viewing angle, I can deal with it. Right. Right. But when you put it into the context of I'm going to be, working with this every day. I'm going to have clients looking at it. I made that call. You know, when I bought my current reference monitor, I looked deeply at both the LMCL-1000 NIT panel and the local dimming panel that I ended up buying. And yes, as we'll talk about,

local dimming panels aren't perfect either. They have their own set of video synchrasies that you have to deal with. But I felt that the viewing angle was so bad comparably between the two that I felt so much more comfortable with this because I can kind of move my head around a little bit and be comfortable where I was sitting without seeing visible color shifts. On the WOL leads and even more so on the LMCLs, I feel like if I shift my chair a little bit, I see slight shifts. And when we saw the first QD OLED panel that we saw and you walk in the room and you just kind of do a circle around it, I mean, in terms of viewing angle, it's like nothing I've ever seen since the studio.

I'll give you a practical example of this. So Joey's right. We should also say that we did, we were lucky enough to be invited by FSI and Brom down to their Atlanta offices last summer to kind of see a prototype version of the first, you know, their XMP 550, which is now shipping, of course. And we did a couple test grades on that monitor. And I was struck by that too, Joey, but in practical terms, like I have an XMP 550 here at home now, right?

And when I was on a WRGB. OLEB4, also an FSI monitor. I did find that like I had to kind of do this little bit, slide to this side of the monitor, slide to this side of the monitor, maybe stand up or whatever, you know, and I would get slight differences to me, like it was almost like a saturation difference, right? And that's kind of why I had moved my head. I am struck by this monitor. It doesn't matter if I'm walking into the room or I'm standing right in front of it or a little off to the side, it kind of just feels the same, which, uh, it's a, to be completely honest, it's a little off putting at first because it's like you're, you're, you're, you're just, it's

something that you're not used to over the past decade or two with monitors. Yeah. Kind of sliding around, you're kind of expecting that change. Um, and I think especially for the bigger ones, as you said, for like client monitoring, you know, those are from you guys, those are available in a 55 and a 65. Um, and that, that can drastically impact. room design, I think, because now you can make decisions where people can, you know, whatever, aesthetics of the room where people are just more comfortable rather than having to force everybody

to be, you know, super head on. Yeah, I think going back to what Joey was saying too, like one of the issues with the LMCL, even if you had like a WRGB OLED in the room as a client monitor, is that if the client had any view of your display as well, they're really concerned why things look so different from where they were sitting, right? They'd be like, your image looks really dark. What are you looking at because that doesn't look like what I'm looking at. And then with the WRGBL is you have to be really careful where you're sitting because they do kind of have the cyan or kind of pink type shift depending on where you're sitting.

And well, Robbie, what you're mentioning with moving your head around is that the viewing angle on those when it came to color shift was actually kind of detrimental to the point where on a large panel sitting close enough, you're off axis of the corners enough to where the corners look like different colors. Totally. And that's where that's moving your head a little bit because. You know, panel size here is something that I think people need to change their expectations over, right? Because in the industry, the professional monitors have always been smaller.

And then we buy cheap consumer panels for the client monitor or playback monitor or whatever, right? There's always been the attitude that the 30 inch should cost in times more than the 55 inch. But now with the QD OLEDs, we can have 55, 65, 65 inch full reference quality monitor. monitors, what's the reason to, I mean, I know, there's room layout reasons to go for smaller monitors or different arrangements, but I think something that people really got to start thinking about is that a 55 inch or a 65 inch can be a reference monitor now. That's never happened before. No, it's a huge kind of paradigm shift, like for people to get their heads wrapped around. And I'll be the first person to say, and I said this even before we had a 31, it does not

work for all rooms. There are rooms where you are going to have to have to have two. two displays, end of story, period, and that's what people do. But there are room layouts where a 55 or 65, if it's of reference quality, can be used as a single monitor. And it does once and for all end this discussion of, hey, the small monitor doesn't look like the big monitor. And what I always thought was so funny is, you know, talking to color, it's like, one of the biggest struggles I hear from them is that they end up playing, you know, what I always say

is part color scientists and part psychologist, right? So it's like they have to explain metamorism to a director or a producer who just doesn't care, their eyes roll to the back of their head, but you have to explain why these things don't look the same because they're different display technologies and even though they measure the same, they may not appear to the same team.

I won't build a room that has two monitors on the same eye line. Even if I have to have two monitors, I don't like to have them visible at the same time for anyone. Or you could be like, Robbie, and just be so OCD level about it that you're calling Brom at one o'clock in the morning and be like, how do I get these four pixels to match? But that's a sidebar. We'll go on.

But no, but the thing is like, so the problem and the fundamental problem with that is, yes, you can perceptually match for the colorist. Then you have a client who walks in the room that sees a little different. Maybe they're 20 years older than you or younger than you. And you can be pretty much guaranteed that the match for you won't be the match for them. In those multi-monitor rooms, I personally, and I know I'm in the minority here, I don't believe in perceptual matching.

Like I said, I would rather put them in such far away angles that you can't see them together. Right. And then, yeah, okay, if you put them together, maybe the W OLED will look a little bit redder than the LCD. But I set up the room so we don't have to do that

because, again, it all comes back to, you need to know that your image is right, and you need to be able to stand behind that because you monitored it correct. and that kind of Kentucky windage to line them up is not going to work for everything. No. But you have much tamer clients than most people than, Joey, because the thing I always hear from Pellaris is, I set it up so they can't see both at the same time, but they stand

up and they walk up behind you. Yeah. No, that happens. And that happens, right? Well, and that's the thing. There's no perfect answer. Until now. So I have a couple more technical things I want to discuss real quick.

Sure. And the one, I have been back and forth on us. Bram, you and I have even talked about this a little bit. But for our listeners and the people watching, I want to just dive into this for a second because to me it's a real thing. But I'm starting to think that maybe it's a little bit of a placebo effect. And that is when I, the first time I've sat in front of one of these QD panels, and I said this to you last summer when we were down Atlanta,

and I still feel this way every time I sit in front of it, is that, It is like a weird black hole of a monitor. And it's really hard to describe because it's not black level per se. It's just that there seems to be like this, I'm going to borrow the quantum physics again, this physical force or aura surrounding these monitors where it just feels like a black hole. Like it's almost like 3D to a point. And I think you've told me that this is a reflectance issue. Can you just going to expand upon that just a little bit?

Because it's something I've been trying to describe to people who have been asking about, oh, should I get a QD OLED, like what's it like? And this is one of the things that I'm most struck by. And I think other people looking at these displays for the first time might be struck and kind of not know what exactly it is that makes them feel that way. Yeah, we get this. It feels like I'm being sucked into a black hole type of thing from a lot of people. But part of the reason for that is that these have what they call really low,

specular component included reflectance. So if you're sitting in front of this display versus like a W-O-LED display, if you have any sort of stray lights in the room, that's going to look more well-defined and reflect back at you clear. You will even see your own reflection as the colorist more clearly on a W-O-Led.

Whereas you get you get definitely a more muted reflectance off of the QD LEDs. And the QDLeds are really interesting in that they have this. They're glossy. If you look at them in a bright room, you can see that it's a glossy panel. But they feel a lot like Matt in a lot of ways. And that's the thing that really trips people up. The kind of explanation behind that is that it has a lot to do with where kind of that

oxide back plane and the panel stack sits. So it actually doesn't sit at the back on a W-O-led. It sits higher up. And that makes it act like a little bit more like a mirror. With the QD-O-Leds, it sits at the back. And the panel, in a sense, absorbs that stray light, which in a dark grading room means that any little bit of stray light kind of does get sort of sucked in, so speak.

So it is a black hole. Yeah, it is kind of like if you have. have a W-O-LED and an LCD and a QD-O-Lead in the same room and you just shine a flashlight on them, right? Yeah. You will see visibly way less flashlight on the QD-O-LED, even if all three displays are turned off. You will see less.

On the flip side, if you're using in much brighter environments, you'll see that the black level does get raised a little bit, right? Because it's kind of like absorbing that light. So that's kind of the flip side of that equation. And you'll hear people talk about it in a lot of different. ways. I think for a grading suite, especially, it becomes this really great thing because it means you're a lot less likely to be distracted because people like the look of glossy, but there's no doubt that, and people like to look at glossy in part because it kind of gives you this kind of higher

mpf, right? And just things look sharper. So you have all that sharpness, but you don't tend to get that same type of reflection. The color is the biggest thing. You know, when you're grading a bright scene and there's a dark area on the screen, on a WL, a lot of times, you'll see your own reflection a little bit. And on these QDiola, you really don't. Yeah, exactly. It's a great, that's a great kind of, I think, segue into probably the last kind of technical thing that I think we should talk about, because that low reflectance along with all these other things we've talked about builds up to what I think the QDOLET has above basically almost all other panel technology, which is incredibly good low to mid shadow detail, right?

Like coming out of black in the very darkest regions, you see not only does it go all the way down to like perfect zero black, which is what everybody wanted with those RGB OLEDs, right? Everybody's like, wow, this image looks amazing because it's super contrasty, but they were kind of a brick wall on the lower end of the signal range. You lost a lot of gradation. And when I move from an RGB OLED to an LCD when I got the XM310K, I honestly, even though, yes, the black level of the LCD is a little bit higher,

Robbie will tell you, I've said since day one with this thing, that I feel like I was a better colorist because I could see deeper into the blacks and see color tense and details in the shadows. I get that same feeling with the QD OLED. There is no steppiness or noise or cut off of detail. Everything in the darkest darks has an incredible amount of detail still in it on these panels. And can I add to that? And Brahmus heard me whinge about this for years, right?

And that is, I agree with you, Joey, on the fallow displays and the slightly lifted black level, especially in SCR, being able to kind of see shadow tents. And I experienced this all the time when I would grade something at home, right, on a W-R-G-B-O-Led, and feel happy with it. Bring it to the studio to do a supervised review. And then I'd be like, oh, I'm noticing these shadow tense, or it just didn't translate as well as I would. And so I went through this rigmarole where, like, okay, I was going to, you know, live. the brightness on the W-OG-GB OLED a little bit. I was going to take a little red out of it. I was going to do all of this perceptual BS to try to get a grade to translate from working on at home where I work a lot, going to the studio. And it was just, I mean, I love the XM310K,

but that workflow for me was just always problematic. I could never, ever get it to be perfect. So fast forward a little bit. I get the XMP 550 at home and kind of simultaneously with some, some, you know, improvements that Brom and the development team have been making the software and stuff like that. I'm at this point now where I can, I have a hundred percent confidence in doing a grade on the QD OLED at home, bringing that to the studio where we still have the XM310K, and getting a spot on, flawless translation from one to the other, right? And yeah, I mean, I think if I had them side by side, there'd still probably be a few little kind of minor perceptual things, but that big like, oh, this feels wrong thing, has completely disappeared to me for me, using QD

OLED, going back to a foul display, and back and forth. And I know, I don't know why I should say, I don't know what that is, but it is really, like for anybody who's on the fence about this, like that translatability to other displays, even when I, when I factor in iPads, iPhones, mobile, you know, laptops like that. I honestly feel that with the QD OLED, I'm getting the best translatability, if that's actually a word, than I've ever gotten on any other display technology before.

Yeah, I think that's an important point too, actually, is that the way that SPD of the spectral power distribution of this display kind of outputs, you also get something that does without having to use an alternate white point, which we haven't talked about. I like people often do on WOLEDs or on especially RGB OLEDs. It just tends to translate better to all these other technologies. And if you look at like the SPD of a QD OLED

versus the older RGB OLED panels and something like a DM250, they are different. And they're different in a way that avoids having to do that. And you don't tend to have, aside from low light details and those types of things, you also don't have this kind of white point kind of feel that's different, you know? You can just use straight D65 and things just translate well. But I agree. That's one thing I love.

It's like I look at something on a QD OLED, then I look at it on my iPad or my MacBook or whatever. And all these displays using like, especially like PFS foster backlights and things like that, it all translates really well to those technologies more so than the older OLED technologies did. It was to the point where I was grading skin tone specifically to feel a little wrong to me, right? I would look at it in a WRGB and I'd make them maybe a little yellower than I think that they actually should be for that translatability. But now I'm having the experience of I just graded it the way I feel like it should work and it's working everywhere. I have one last set of thing I want to ask, and it's specifically about, or discuss it's specifically about HDR, right? I feel in this jump to HDR over the past decade, we've obviously, as we discussed, volumetric collapse, that's one compromise.

there's been a lot of compromises in getting to kind of a good HDR display, right? And valid displays in particular have gotten a bad rap over the years for some of the problems they have with loading behavior, blooming, you know, the Starfield being the classic example of, hey, I like you want to see your display to go crazy. But, you know, that loading behavior on like, you know, some of the early RGB top emission OLEDs going. And every time you put something bright on it, you get the overload button going, you know, going crazy. Oled, excuse me, QD OLEDs up to 2,000 nits right now, the smaller ones doing up to 1,000 nits. Can you just kind of, can you just tell us a little bit about kind of the, for those who are people who are doing a lot of HDR work, besides some of those limitations, what does that roadmap look like moving forward?

Are we going to continue to get brighter? Do you think kind of things are kind of balanced out right now? Because most content, it's somewhere between 1,000 minutes and 2,000 nits. What do you think that that kind of looks like for the future? Yeah. So I think currently the displays kind of hit the benchmarks that you would want to hit for the vast majority of deliverables, right? So especially the bigger ones, the 55 and the 65 at 2,000 nits.

All the missive displays still are going to have some. degree of ABL, right? So you're not going to do 2,000 that's full screen. But on something like a on a XMP 550, you can still do like a L50, so linear 50 percent diagonal size, patch size. You can still do 650 nets, which is really bright. And the good thing about QD OLED is that while it's already hitting these benchmarks I think are great for a lot of today's workflows, this is not a stagnant technology. It will continue to evolve. And I think that's why there's a lot of kind of hope and investment

and long-term, you know, excitement about this technology. Yes, you might start getting more requests for 4,000 or 5,000 that deliverables one day. But once those things become more of a reality, you're going to start seeing quantum. dot OLEDs get there. So they started around 1,000 nits, then they went up to 2,000. SDC, the panel supplier for these is already showing 3,000-mit prototypes. So things are going in the right direction. Now, as you get smaller, heat dissipation becomes more of an issue, right? Because you've got the same number of pixels and much smaller space. So yes, the small one only does 1,000 minutes. For most people, that's more than good enough because the reality is that

we go to most Hollywood post houses, they're like, look, we can barely get our color. risk to do over 200 minutes, right? So it's a struggle. But also again, for the first time, the smaller one is actually lower price point as well. That's the huge thing too, right? So it's like, hey, I have to do a thousand knit deliverable and my APLs are going to be reasonable. What am I going to buy? Am I going to buy a $30,000 monitor? I'm going to buy a $10,000 monitor. And so the $10,000 monitor is going to get the job done for the vast majority people. Now, if your Pixar and you're doing a $4,000, NIT master, yeah, you're going to need that super special $40,000 display. There are people who need that stuff.

We're not denying that. Why aren't we focusing on 4,000-knit displays using other technologies right now? Because, again, we think by the time there's actually mass momentum in our industry and a desire for actual 4,000 knit or more deliverables, quantum.o-o-led or some successor to it, like maybe ELQD in the long-term future, will get to those types of light output levels without any of the other drawbacks that you have of these things. I mean, the benchmark we always used to make it less esoteric is that a lot of stuff was graded on a brand S monitor that it was a thousand knit HDR display. And it did about 200 nits full screen.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it exactly. A thousand nits. A thousand nits. And those did about 200 nits full screen.

So both of our monitors of the 31 to the 50s. and actually I shall three of them and 65, I'll do 250 Nets full screen. So it's already brighter than that, right? So yes, there is ABL, but how meaningful is it for you? If you're working on cartoons where you're artificially pushing stuff up, sure, if you're working on, you know, stuff with reasonable APLs, you know, you're not really, you know, most of the area is 200, 300, 300 nits. And then you have some specular highlights to go to 1,000 or more.

This is going to be more than good enough for those people. And if ABL is a concern, get the big ones. That's my advice, because the big ones, as a 2,000-knit monitor, 4,000-8 grades, they basically have almost no AVL that's going to impact you. Yeah, and I think, you know, the other thing, the last thing I'll say about this in this discussion is that, you know, I think that everybody, you know, because obviously QD OLED is also gaining speed in the consumer landscape as well. There are companies who are making, you know, computer monitors, home TVs, whatever. You know, one thing that I will say that I just think that, you know, because there's the obvious stuff,

12 GSDI, the switchable color space and gamets and, you know, on-screen scopes, all the, all the wonderful stuff that you guys do on your monitors to support the professional user. But when I have this discussion with people, and they're like, oh, well, maybe I'll just buy a consumer version of this, right? One of the things that I'm just head over heels for on these monitors and something, you know, initiative you've been doing, you guys have been doing the past couple of years, but makes a huge difference is AutoCow. Right. And I just, I wish that I could scream it for more mountain tops about how awesome AutoCal is, right? And for those of you don't know, AutoCal gives you the ability with

a monitor to plug in a compatible probe via USB to the USB slot of the monitor, bring up the auto Cal routine, you just kind of line it up on a crosshairs on the center of the monitor, and hit go. In about 20, 25 minutes, you have all of your EOTFs and all of your gamets in the SDR and HDR calibrated for that display. And it's fast enough. It's like one of those things like if you had a gigantic huge, you know, review session coming up, and you just want to get that monitor, make sure it's 100% spot on, plug the meter and go. And I'm not trying to discount all the wonderful, you know, the software out there,

you know, calibration software tools and all that kind of stuff. But as a non-full-time calibrator and somebody who bothers Brom incessantly about calibrated, about calibration software in general, this has literally been manna from heaven for me, right? That it's just sort of like plug in the monitor and hit go. And so for those of you who are considering QDL, jump to QD OLED and maybe debating consumer versions versus, you know,

professional versions like FSI offers, I am not going to like pull punches here. AutoCal. It's the sole reason, the sole reason that you should consider this because... And doing a work for... flow like Robbie and I do where we have home offices with two different types of monitors and a viewing suite for clients with another different type of monitor, all of them using AutoCal to

calibrate, we can go to any of these rooms, open up the project and it looks exactly how we expect it to. So that's a topic for a full on topic for another discussion, another day with you, Bram, but I just want to just point that out to people that. No, I appreciate it. I mean, yeah, I mean, it was important for us. And I'm glad you brought that up because that's the thing that we've been mentioning more and more people. And don't get me wrong. Our displays, if you prefer to use CalMEN or ColorSpace, they're fully compatible with those. I'm huge fans of those programs, and they do give excellent results.

The problem is they give excellent results and they work really well because I live in those applications a lot. Our team does. We use them day in and day out. And QC reports to build lots for older monitors. We understand how they work. If it's not something that you're doing every single day and all, you know, every update, oh, you know, they switch the behavior of this button or whatever. It can be mind-numbing.

And honestly, there's one thing I think that AutoCal has going for it, specifically in the FSI ecosystem that should not be discounted, is that it can make a cheap colorimeter much better than it normally would be. Because usually when you do a full calibration, right, you use a spectro radiometer to make offsets for your particular panel technology to then load into your colorimeter to ground your, to ground your calibration in actual physical reality, right? Your calibration will only ever be as good as those offsets in your colorimeter.

And one of the things that FSI does is they will sell you the, like, I forget, what are the lower level colorimeters that you guys sell that you can preload with the Yeah, so we have the I1D3DS, the CR100 for XMP, the brighter ones we do recommend the CRR and we are working on I1D3DS compatibility for at least the 3D3. We might do it for the bigger models. We're still testing that. But you're right. We load in those matrices and that helps a lot to give you, you know, an inexpensive probe

that matches, you know, a $20,000 reference spectro. And that is a huge part of it as well, Joe. You're absolutely right. But for us, it was just this logical thing where, like, people are making mistakes. And Robbie, the scary thing, honestly, for us as a display manufacturer is that as much as you contacted me with questions. questions, you were probably one of like the 10% most competent of the people trying to calibrate at home. And that was a scary part. It's like, man, if, you know, Robbie, who's

explaining this to other people and does know this stuff, it's calling me with this many questions, like, how is everybody else doing this? And so that was fundamentally a thing. Like, if you're a professional calibrator and you use color space or Calman, you get great results, more power to you. You can still use that with our system if you want. But for the average everyday user, these displays are linear enough. We have spent over two years developing this for XMP series where you can just plug it in and it does it. And again, it calibrates for everything. That's the other important thing, right? It's like you could spend all this time getting a perfect P3PQ full range calibration. And then you got to do it again. And then you get a delivery spec and like,

oh, you got to do 2020. And you're like, oh, crap, I got to pull out my computer again. I know, man. You just make a new selection and it just works. And so that's a huge part of it is just the simplicity. Like, I will even say, like, if you were to spend three hours calibrating with color space for a particular target, you might even get slightly a lower delta E values. I'm not even denying that. But the thing is, are you going to get it right? And with the autocal system, it's going to do a good job.

Rob, you sent me your D figures. They look pretty impressive. So we do a pretty good job, we think. But the main thing is you're just, you're not going to get it wrong. And that's the thing that I think is really important is that it is, we've tried to make it as user-friendly as possible. You no longer have to be an expert. And you also don't have to pay for the calibration software. You don't have to pay for licenses over time.

So there are upsides to it from a cost perspective as well. Excellent. Well, Brom, we can't thank you enough for joining us on this episode, share your thoughts on QD OLED. It's exciting times. I share your enthusiasm. I haven't been this jazzed and this, how should I say, calm about my reference viewing in a long, long time. And that's your credit, your entire team, the engineering staff, everybody for doing some great work on this. Just so everybody knows, you can head over to flanderscientific.com to read more information about these panels.

They also have a great YouTube channel if you want to learn more about metamorism and all these other technical things that we might have been doing. talking about, get a demo of how AutoCal works, et cetera. And then when you are ready to purchase and just so everybody knows, the QDOL line now, the XMP line is available with 31, a 55 and a 65. So lots of different sizes to meet your needs, all with 12GSDI, all with AutoCal, and the great features the industry has come to love about monitors. Brom, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, yes.

Really, really elucidating on a lot of stuff about QDOLA. So for the Offset Podcast, I'm Robbie Carmen. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for watching.