Best Products ASUS ZenScreen MB16AC 15.6-Inch Full HD IPS Monitor

          Other Customer Rating:

• 15.6” FHD IPS USB Type-C portable monitor with hybrid signal solution for compatibility with USB Type-C and Type-A sources (Note: DisplayLink driver needed for Type-A connection)
• Ultra-portable award-winning design at 1.7 pounds and 0.3 inches slim to pair perfectly with ASUS laptops
• Smart cover and smart pen hole allow for landscape and portrait orientations easily with auto rotation
• ASUS Eye Care technology with TUV Rheinland-certified flicker-free backlighting and blue light filter minimizes eye fatigue
• Easily toggle through advanced display settings with the intuitive ASUS DisplayWidget. Compliance and Standards- Energy Star, BSMI, CB, CCC, CE, FCC, KCC, RoHS, UkrSEPRO, UL/cUL, VCCI, WEEE, WHQL (Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7), RCM, TUV Flicker-free , TUV Low Blue Light, CU(EAC)

Product description

Size:15.6-Inch  |  Style:ZenScreen

The ideal travel companion for laptops, the 15.6" Full HD IPS Zen Screen MB16AC USB Type-C portable monitor features the world's first hybrid signal solution.

Top customer reviews

This is an absolutely fantastic, slim, portable display. I'm an app developer and it slips in my bag with ease.

Before I plugged it into my MacBook, I downloaded and installed the driver from the Asus website. However, the screen was extremely laggy. Just moving the mouse around the screen was a glitchy nightmare. I read all of the reviews and couldn't find anyone experiencing the same thing. I began to think it was my computer, but everything was up-to-spec. After about an hour of Googling, I came across the DisplayLink driver page. Just so everyone is clear, Asus makes the hardware, but it's using DisplayLink as a driver. The one on the Asus site is either outdated or incomplete. I downloaded and installed the driver directly from the DisplayLink website. Amazon won't let me post the link, but just do a quick google search for DisplayLink Mac driver and you'll be all set!

All of the lag is gone! The display runs perfectly. I love this thing. I'm probably going to get another soon. Very glad I found this. I hope the driver tip helps someone else!

Video Compression Fundamentals; a Tech Breakfast presentation

https://youtu.be/ZejjAXSXyZA

Part of the ongoing series of Tech Breakfast presentations at Jigsaw24, Golden Square.

My notes are here and I'm available for birthdays, weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Why I wouldn't buy a Sony BVM-X300 in 2018 (if it was my money)

For a couple of years the Sony BVM-X300 has been the 4k/HDR monitor of choice for Soho edit and grading suites. It is an OLED monitor and can (with some limits) hit 1,000 Cd/m² peak white in it's HDR modes (which include HLG, Dolby PQ and SLog3 camera gamma).

It was the first monitor to be widely regarded as good enough for Dolby Vision mastering (and by extension Netflix deliverables). It was around the £20k mark when it launched, but by last year the price had crept up to mid-twenties and with the v2 of the monitor (which brought a second quad-SDi input and an HDMI input) which launched a year ago it now lists at £32k; but we all know nobody ever pays list for Sony...!

In recent months I've really taken to the Eizo CG3145 which (although an IPS/LCD monitor) is broadly similar in spec to the Sony, but; bear in mind the X300 suffers the following;

1. Noise in the blacks; when I calibrate them I have to do blacks at 5% grey to get a clean reading (and my probe goes down to 0.01 Cd/m²) – the Eizo will read cleanly at 2% grey. Watch this video (hosted on my Twitter feed) - it's an X300 around 3 Cd/m²
2. Max. 8% peak white before the orange PSU-fault LED comes on and the display starts to dim/de-saturate in HDR modes; at the recent Jigsaw24 I showed the "OLED killer" which you can get here.
3. Two years in and several Soho X300s are now showing burn-in (particularly where the 3840-pixel UHD and 4096 pixel-4k rasters differ) 

£10k less list price and available now (the X300 is in such short supply that you can't get one in London currently) also add to the Eizo’s advantages. Integration with LightSpaceCMS (pretty much the industry standard for colour management) is very tight whereas the X300 only talks to Sony’s very clunky colour software (no LUT management, six-point calibration only). 

The Eizo easily allows LUT upload; this SLog3 (in slot 8) was imported via LightSpace.

 

The Eizo has recently been certified as both a Dolby Vision mastering display as well as having Netflix's blessing.

One objection I've heard is that the X300 covers 85% of rec.2020 whereas the CG3145 only covers ~83%. It's the kind of objection that someone with a poor grasp of colourimetry makes. My answer to that is "MacAdam ellipses" - look at the Wikipedia article and tell me anyone can see the (Just Noticable!) differences.

At the recent HDR Summit at Dock10 in Media City, Salford we had more than ten HDR-capable displays.

Electrical Safety in Film & TV + 18th Edition; Tech Breakfast presentation

BS 7671 is the national standard to which all electrical installations should conform.  The 18th Edition IET Wiring Regulations contains important new information for all electrical installers and engineers.

In the next Tech Breakfast I focus on the 18th edition of the The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) regs, which will debut this summer & I review best practice for designing and constructing power distribution in machine rooms and remote data centres for film and TV.

Electrical safety is one thing no broadcast engineer can ignore. 

https://youtu.be/dsuQVR1wNKc
https://electrical.theiet.org/wiring-matters/issues/61/bs-7671-the-18th-edition-report/

12G cabling - test results and a video presentation

I presented a recent Tech Breakfast at Jigsaw24, Golden Square. Here I detail the tests we've done across four cable types and how they perform at twelve gigabits/sec (as per SMPTE 2082-1).

We've recently taken on Leader as a manufacturer of test sets and they excel in several areas - namely UHD/4K/HDR and 12G physical layer measurements. 

 all the specs for SMPTE 2082-1

I got through all the details in the video (below and on YouTube) but you can snag my results here - if you go into the 12G folder you can see the screen grabs for all the eye patterns - the filename number related to the test line in the PDF.  The Powerpoint presentation is in there too; but if you watch the video I cut all the slides full-screen as appropriate.

 The cable types are;

SD05 - Belden 1855; otherwise known as "Image 360"
SD10 - Belden 1694
SD50 - Belden 1505; otherwise known as "Image 1000"
SD73 - Belden 7731 - about the most ungainly cable you can crimp a BNC onto!

Fibre for breakfast - keeps you regular...

I've have been a terrible blogger over the last couple of months; just super-busy at work, but I have done a couple of presentations in Jigsaw24's ongoing series of Tech Breakfasts.




All the slides are here.

A few notes on DolbyPQ & the new 4k AppleTV and TV High Dynamic Range.

STOP PRESS! 27th Sept. 2017 Update;

So it turns out that the new AppleTV does support HLG.

- Why did it take somebody hacking around with a firmware update to discover it; perhaps big corporations (Apple and Dolby) talk and would rather not highlight the fact?


HDR is half my life at the moment; the distinction between "Display Referred" and "Scene Referred" video is lost on most people, but is pretty central to understanding why the BBC/NHK "Hybrid Log Gamma" system is ten times more appropriate for television (non-theatrical video) vs anything based on the SMPTE 2084 (AKA Dolby/HDR10 etc) curve.

For my presentation on "intro to HDR for TV" download here.

1. Display Referred HDR makes no sense for TV (when I say TV I mean all non theatrical video). DolbyPQ makes video dimensioned (so code values actually represent light levels) which makes a lot of sense when you have complete control over the environment you're viewing in - a theatre. To define where black and white sit (and actually assign light-levels to them) is problematic for TV workflows. Remember, you have to give the colourist/racks-engineer/domestic-viewer the liberty to set black according to the room. Although BT.1886 is commonly accepted to mean 100Cdm^-2 peak white a lot of colourists drive their rooms at 80Cdm^-2 and at least one film guy I know prefers to work at 60Cdm^-2. Also - what happens in three years when everyone is selling TVs with specular highlights that can hit 2,000Cdm^-2 and people can see the difference between PQ content mastered with peaks at 1,000Cdm^-2 ( the current standard) and new content? The same will be true all the way up to Dolby's max light level of 10,000Cdm^-2. Dolby at least has the benefit of dynamic metadata to allow or this, but HDR10 is static metadata and so has all the problems of display-referred HDR with none of the DolbyPQ benefits.
2. BBC/NHK HLG is a much more pragmatic solution as it doesn't assign code-value to light-levels (when has that ever been a thing in TV?!) and allows HDR content to look good on all devices capable of displaying it; tablets, TVs, laptops etc. It also allows the broadcasters to make a gradual change to HDR. None of the broadcasters I've spoken to have any appetite for having Dolby CMUs all over the place to manage the metadata (which, being a licensed format, they would be obliged to have). HLG also tracks 1886 for most of the curve (to around 65%) which means conversion to/from is easier and even when you get it wrong the pictures look OK. It's why scene-referred video makes sense for TV.
3. Having seen the same SLog3 (so camera HDR gamma) played out from Transkoder in both DolbyPQ (mastered at 1,000Cdm^-2) next to the same machine converting to HLG with two Sony X300 monitors set for the appropriate gamma curves and the same Rec.2020 colour calibration you could not tell them apart in a blind viewing. 
4. It's typical Dolby - they are trying to dominate the domestic space by shoe-horning their theatrical format into TVs. Broadcasters get hobbled with licensing costs, onerous upgrade requirements and pictures that are locked to whatever version of PQ/HDR10/HDR10+ they were mastered for rather than allowing the display to make the best of what it's given; scene referred pictures.
5. The good thing about HLG is that rec.2100 ratifies it, the DVB have too. It's also trivial to upgrade HDR10-capable sets to support it (unlike PQ). I imagine it'll be the case that broadcasters will deliver HDR (for the reasons mentioned) and either you have to upgrade your TV (but pretty much all the current ones support it out of the box) OR your STB will do the conversion.

Which is why the new 4k AppleTV is a damp-squib...