"I have seen the future of rock and roll, and it's name is Bruce Springsteen" - Jon Landau, Rolling Stone Magazine, 1974

But in this instance it was a new style of high definition TFT-based display. Bightside have a range of displays that aren't rear-illuminated with fluorescent tubes but with an array of hi-bright LEDs that are modulated with the luminance of the image being displayed. The array of LEDs is much lower-res than the 1920x1080 pixel matrix and so the real image (as displayed on the LCD) is modified with a masking signal to get the illumination to the correct resolution and the results are superb. A dynamic range of near 100dBs (that's fourteen stops to the cinematographers) and a maximum light output of 3000 cd/m² (you line-up a monitor for TV grading with peak white at 80 cd/m²!). I couldn't vouch for the colourimetry but it did look pretty close to illumninant-D. The detail in the blacks was astonishing and next to a Sony GDM monitor (which a lot of people use for grading!) the pictures looked remarkable. It was like a light-box with a moving transparency on it! I hope our friends at Filmlight implement a Truelight LUT for this device and I think that you'll see these in film grading suites really soon.

Interestingly there were a couple of facilities engineers and MDs there and they didn't seem to get it - the one quote I'll remember for a while was "we could use one in reception..."! I suppose when folks first looked at colour TV, stereo audio, digital video etc etc there were folks who couldn't see how to make it fit into their workflow and therefore couldn't see any value in it. I was blown away, however.

They also had a very cool compression system for reducing the data-load on 32-bit high dynamic range images.