Hello, it's Patrick Inhofer with MixingLight.com and I am at the worldwide headquarters of Flanders Scientific here with CEO Bram Desmet and we're here to talk about something very, very exciting, which is quantum dots. That's correct, yeah. Quantum dots are in the house, they're a real thing and I'm looking at them right now and this is a brand new display that you are unveiling in the coming days from the time of this recording. And so you invited me up here to Atlanta and I've gotten my eyes on this thing and I have to say it's super impressive. And this is a reference display that we're talking about.
Absolutely. Thanks for coming out and taking a look. Patrick got eyes on this just about before anybody.
So this is going to be our XMP550 which is a new 55 inch HDR mastering monitor we've So this is going to be our XMP550 which is a new 55 inch HDR mastering monitor we've developed and this uses a Quantum Dot OLED display. What really makes this special is that we're kind of getting over this situation of having small reference monitors and then large client monitors that maybe aren't quite reference quality. This really is intended as something that can serve as a primary grading display and also is big enough for the client to see. So highlights of the display. It could do 2000 nits peak luminance so it can definitely be used for those 1000 nits HDR masters without a problem.
And it is a truly additive system so it's red, green, blue, additive for white which means no volumetric collapse, no volumetric limitations like you might have with WOLED displays and also it's a lot brighter than a lot of the other RGB OLED technologies out there. So as opposed to something that's maybe capped at 500 or 700 nits, again this can do 2000 nits peak and again full color volume, no volumetric collapse. That means you get bright reds, bright greens, bright blues, you don't get any of that color volume collapse that you might get on other technologies. And now the color volume collapse and this is really important and I honestly think that that's really one of the most important impressive things I see about this display. So basically you have on for example some of the previous brighter OLED technologies were a, as you said, WRGB system. So they essentially used a white subpixel as a boost.
So you could do white as bright as you wanted to, you could do white for example at 1000 nits without a problem. But the problem is that in a system that is color accurate, when you're doing 1000 nits for white you maybe should be able to do 600, 700 nits for green and instead you might have been doing 200 or 300 nits for green. And of course there's this interplay between brightness and saturation so it also just looks more desaturated with that luminance drop. So I think a lot of people will be kind of surprised when they look at some of the previous content if you've graded SDR on a W-OLED, no problem. But if you tried to grade HDR without referencing a smaller truly additive reference display in the past, you may notice that some of the saturation that was missing on your previous display will now be visible on this display. So again this kind of sets a new benchmark in terms of something that's big enough for everybody to look at but also is going to match or even exceed the capabilities of some of the smaller reference monitors that people have been using in the past.
So UHD resolution and again reference grade color performance and one of the other beautiful things about it is that the off-access viewing is just phenomenal. Not only is it large enough for your clients to see but we were talking about this too. Your clients can now actually sit off-access from you and be looking at the same image. Everybody here when we first got the display in to test with was kind of joking that you finally lose the image when you're standing behind the monitor. But from the side there's really very little color shift, very little luminance drop. Even at a 60 degree angle you're still maintaining over 80% of the same luminance that you have on-access compared to some other technologies where you might have 55% or less of that luminance off-access at 60 degrees.
So really phenomenal in that respect and also very minimal color shift off-access gives people the flexibility to sit anywhere in the room and be looking at the same image without having to sit over the colorist's shoulder to make sure you're seeing the same thing. I would often have directors where they'd be like they move their chair to be directly middle and then people like stand behind them to kind of you know you get that type of behavior going on in the grading suite and that's pretty much eliminated here. What about up down? Yeah vertical same thing you can really sit high low doesn't matter if you want to mount it on a wall. You have people sitting you know in a theater type setup where you may be there the clients are sitting in a platform that's higher than you or lower than you. People looking at the same image off-access doesn't really matter to the side up down. So again a lot more flexibility I think it's going to change what people can do in their rooms and also give people the flexibility to if they want to run single monitor rooms now.
Whereas before that was always a challenge because a lot of the big displays weren't really quite up to the task of at least the HDR mastering portion whereas this can be used for that. And also again 31" it's hard to have everybody look at the same time. At 55" you really can do that. So but yeah it's a it's very exciting technology. I've been doing this since 2005 in the display industry and this is probably the most excited I've been about in displaying quite some time because it really is impressive on all accounts.
All right let's talk the nitty gritty here. Yeah. Bram... Delivery. And pricing. When's it available? How much is it going to cost us? Yeah so we're hopefully going to get these shipping in August or September.
That's our goal anyway. But we're well on track for that right now. We have a couple prototypes already built so we're well on our way to getting all that done. Just waiting on delivery of more panels to us and then we'll start shipping them out to customers.
And in terms of price target price is $19,995. trying to keep it under twenty thousand dollars. So you broke the $20K barrier. We're trying really hard to do that. We think that it's important to make HDR mastering monitors at least a little bit more affordable.
We're trying to get away from this $35,000 to $55,000 dollar price points we've been living with in the past. Because if we want to see a lot more HDR content then the displays for this mastering of that HDR content have got to become more affordable. So we're doing what we can on our end to make that possible. You still get all the professional connectivity of course. 12 gigabit a second SDI.
You can do quad 3G. You can do double six. You can do single 12G, 444 RGB, 12 bit, 10 bit signals no problem. It does all those things. And then it will have our volumetric AutoCal like we do on our DM series monitors as well so be able to plug a probe directly into it for a full auto cal of the display for all color space targets, all EOTF targets. And it is essentially a true volumetric auto cal so we're not just doing a white balance only adjustment.
We are essentially profiling the native behavior of the display. And then what we do is we store that information on the display and then we build LUTs on the fly for whatever target color space you might need to do. Anybody who has any of our DM series monitors currently is probably familiar with that process now. It's really simplified calibration, you get accurate results without having to be an expert, without having to pull out software to do it.
You just plug the probe directly in, hit a few buttons and it runs through the process in a very automated way. And again it gives you the flexibility of not only calibrating for one color space setup but for all possible selections on the monitor. The really great thing about it too is that calculation, you only have to do that at one time and then it saves it to memory and so you don't have to recalculate that LUT until the next time you run a native profile on the monitor. So the reason we don't calculate it ahead of time for all possible combinations is because there are thousands of them and we don't want to waste your time.
If you don't need P3 with Gamma 2.0 and 9300K white balance then we don't want to waste your time and make a LUT for that. But if you need that crazy combination for whatever reason, no problem, select those things in the menu, boom, you'll get a LUT generated, save to the display to accurately give you that color rendition on screen. Let's talk a little bit about technology now. So this is 55 inches. So that's where the XMP-550 comes from.
And what are the chances that we're going to get scaled down versions of this? Because all of this is, all of this technology is built on consumer displays. And so it's up to these billion dollar producers that have these huge factories to decide to cut down to 32 inches, right? Yeah, so the beautiful thing about Quantum Dot OLED technology is it is very scalable. So 77" all the way down to one day maybe 27" or smaller should in theory be possible. It is imminently more scalable than a lot of other technologies. So starting with 55, that is the size that was available at the performance benchmarks that we were looking at.
But we do have high hopes that it can be scaled to other sizes we're not locked into in the future just looking at one size. So very, very scalable. Can't make any promises about exact things that might or might not be coming. But we certainly are encouraging the panel manufacturer to look into those different sizes again meeting the performance benchmarks and the criteria that we're looking for.
Things like UHD resolution, at least 1,000 nits, wide color gamut. But it is at least in theory possible. Do you think we will actually ever, we will break that $10,000 31" price, for a 31" inch display we can break that price point? It remains to be seen. We'll see if it's possible. But it's, yeah, I think that's not out of the realm of possibility. But we'll have to see how things develop.
You know, some of those things like what we get charged for panels are beyond our control. Yeah, of course. I think we've already seen a lot of positive kind of movement on that in this respect.
And that if you had told me two years ago, "Hey, Bram, one day you'll be selling a sub $20,000 55 inch, 2000 nit HDR mastering monitor." I would say, "You're crazy." That's never going to happen. But it's happening. And I think that there's a lot of room for pricing to continue to kind of improve over time as it typically does as technologies mature. So I have high hopes that we'll get to more and more attainable price points for people.
Quantum Dot, I have to ask you because I'm very -- the term AI, right? It drives me insane. Yeah, right. If you read my Sunday newsletter, I rail on it at least once or twice a month because you know, everyone calls everything AI.
It's not AI. It's machine learning. It's not AI.
It's not intelligent. Quantum Dot. Is this like actual quantum physics or is this a marketing term? No, I mean, they are actual quantum dots. And so what ends up happening on this technology is that the baseline is a blue electroluminescent layer. So it's a self-emitting per pixel technology. And then what you end up having happen is the blue actually passes through unfiltered.
So your blue light output is just the blue OLED material. But then the blue light actually goes through a green and a red quantum dot conversion layer. So it hits that layer and it actually converts that light from blue to green or from blue to red. One of the beautiful things about that is you get kind of more even aging over time, more stability over time because you're starting at the same blue OLED material. You don't have differential aging in the OLED material with red OLED, green OLED, blue OLED.
So starting with the same baseline really helps in that respect. And these really great on these because of that. And also it's a top emission technology which is what gives us some of those benefits of that great off-access viewing and also just being able to hit those high nit kind of values on the output of the display. One of the things that I find interesting about all of this is when you compare the different technologies that we've been using over the past couple of years.
Of course, nowadays, Mixing Light, in fact, probably just recently on an Office Hours we talked about. All right, if you need something that's kind of reference-like but you can't put down $30,000 for a display, maybe like the whatever it is, the 12-inch iPad Pro or something like that, right? The colorimitry comes out pretty solid right from the factory. It's got really high nit values and it's something that, you know, we're like, it's not reference mastering but it's a target you can at least look at and you know that that's what people are looking at but it doesn't really show you the ones and zeros, right? Yeah, there's some limitations there and we were looking at that earlier because we had a, actually the laptop here uses the full array local dimming backlight as well. And some of these shots in particular, we're looking at some of these like details around headlights and small lights and with a lot of the full array local dimming, you'll get those things blown out.
You lose all the highlight detail. There's a shot in this demo reel we were looking at where there was a corner of a kiosk that had all this detail around bright lights and on the full array local dimming when we compare the same image, you just saw a white blob. There's no detail.
Yeah, it's just nothing there. It's just pure white. It almost looks like it's clipped out but it's not clipped.
No, it's just actually like a blooming of the full array local dimming. So there's enough bright lights there that it's trying to achieve that peak and it's kind of just washing out the detail that's around those headlights. It can't resolve the fine detail. Yeah, basically the detail is higher resolution than the actual full array local dimming backlight is.
Whereas here you have per pixel level control, which means that you can have much darker areas next to very bright areas and you can actually resolve that detail correctly. So it has a lot of advantages there. Again, similar to what we were talking about with the color volume reproduction, what you see here is what you really have. So you see the accurate color, but you also see the accurate detail on a per pixel level.
Also because it's not full array local dimming, you don't have to worry about those motion artifacts in addition to the concerns about small bright objects, halation, those types of issues. So it solves a lot of those problems for people. Again, we feel that it's a truly reference grade image that solves a lot of these kind of limitations of other HDR technologies. All right. So we've covered a lot of ground here on this display. Did I miss anything? Is there anything I should have asked you? There are a few things that I think are nice highlights.
We've sold W OLEDs, we've sold RGB OLEDs, we've sold full array local dimming, we've sold static backlights. So we're familiar with all the different display technologies, right? And each one has kind of pros and cons. Some of the things that I think are highlights of this are one is longevity of the product. So these OLED materials last a lot longer than previous generations.
So this is a product that should serve people well for quite a while. Similarly, because this has 2000 nit peak, we understand most people are grading at 1000 nit and that's how most deliverables are still going out. If you want to do a 2000 nit grade and deliverable, you could do that. But more importantly as well, you get so much headroom. So a lot of these other display technologies go out to market. Maybe it'll do 1000 nits when it's brand new, even six months down the road, you're not quite hitting 1000 nits anymore.
Here you've got so much headroom that two, three, four years down the road, not a problem. Still hitting at least well over 1000 nits, so you're not going to slip below that kind of threshold. The other nice thing with this is that the power efficiency is actually quite good as well compared to a lot of other HDR technologies, especially ones that can get this bright. So we're rating the power consumption on this somewhere depending on the content, because it is very content dependent, but we're seeing ranges of 75 watts to 325 watts is about the maximum draw that we've seen.
A lot of other technologies that can get to 1000 nits plus are drawing way more power than that, especially when you start getting to this sort of size. So this is as power efficient as a lot of the 31 inch monitors, even though it's a much, much larger display. And then the other thing that I think is quite phenomenal is the uniformity on these. So that's always been a big complaint with some other OLED technologies.
We pulled up some full fields. That's good. And it's it's remarkable. It really is remarkable.
It's always hard to get uniformity great on large panels. But this has done about as good a job as I've ever seen on something of this size. So yeah, you actually I found my eyes were playing tricks on me. It was so yeah, it's more like hey, is this monitor reflecting on it or your eyes start seeing like dots and things like that. It's just your eyes are not familiar. Used to seeing some quite as auto generated.
Yeah, it's it's very clean looking. Yeah, so it's it's also not very reflective, which is nice. So you still get like nice, deep, glossy looking blacks. But at the same time, like, you know, if you have light shining off the colorist because there's a bright object in one corner, you really don't see the colorist being reflected back like it's a mirror like you do on some other display.
So low reflectance on these makes it, I think, particularly well suited for the grading suite as well. I'm curious, though, on the Quantum Dot OLED. In terms of maximum brightness values, in terms of going forward in the future, we're at 2000 nits right now, is the is there a kind of a top level that OLED is just natural OLED will never get above that? I have I've become a lot more optimistic on on these things. You know, it used to be that getting even to 1000 nits on an OLED just seems so bonkers.
And then we got displays that went to 1000 nits. And now here we are just a few years later at 2000 nits. So I think that there is a lot of room to improve and I wouldn't put it past anybody to develop OLED materials that can get even brighter. I mean, the generation one of this same panel was only doing about 1500 nits.
And now here we are on the generation two and it's already doing 2000 nits. So you know, I can't speculate. I'm not the panel manufacturer. And while I'm in love with the technology and read up about OLED materials a lot, that's not OLED material development is not my expertise. But I do not put it past these companies to be able to get these things brighter and brighter.
Yeah, I got to say, my general perception now that we've kind of talked about all of this, my kind of takeaway from looking at this is I'm seeing colors. First of all, your demo material is fantastic. And it really does allow you to see colors, you -- I haven't seen on a display. I mean, I just I haven't seen them. And especially when you start getting into the primaries and the bright primaries.
The other thing too, especially when we were kind of dissecting the local array dimming the highlights, the detail in the highlights is brilliant. Even when there's color in there, you got very rich colors with lots of detail. And it doesn't look it looks weird.
It does look a little weird because you haven't seen it. Right. But it's weird for a television.
Right. And that's what makes it weird. It's just you've never seen a medium be quite that bright and colorful.
My prediction is the consumer version of this panel is going to end up in museums all over the world. And if you're looking for business opportunity, then museums feeding this content into museums. It's quite quite something. And yeah, like you said, I mean, again, you don't have to use that wider palette, right? But to have it there, I think is important. And also because on some of these other -- some of these things have that wider palette.
It's natural, especially the nature stuff. And if you have something that has like volumetric collapse or other issues, the problem is you may be pushing things that the display is artificially limiting. And then when you do finally get it on display like this, you're like, oh, I overcooked that.
And if you've never seen it because the display was doing something that was incorrect, essentially, that can be problematic. And this display solves that problem. And this gets us into wrap up this whole conversation.
I'll just kind of finish this thought for our members. Mixing light, a lot of the questions that we field have to do with, well, do I really need a reference display if my clients are watching, if my audience is watching on YouTube or on an LCD display or they're watching at home on an OLED that's a tenth of the price? And the answer is you do if you're going to charge for it. If people are going to pay you for it. Because the ones and zeros, the data that's on of these images that lives on our computers has meaning. There's meaning in the color that information it contains and the brightness information it contains. And what you want is a display that can accurately reproduce the ones and zeros on the hard drive.
And even to this day, we are still compromising, especially with the advent of HDR and PQ and Rec 2020, where we've now have standards that are designed to exceed our physical capabilities of reproducing this. They did this on purpose to give us room to grow. And so now it really is if you want longevity and into the work that you're doing to be able to call it up five years later and not feel embarrassed, like what the heck was I doing? We have to remaster this, right? There's going to be a lot of remastering going on as technologies like this get more widespread, more developed, more mature, and at price points where more and more people can finally start implementing this. Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you very much for watching.
Thank you, Bram. Thank you. I appreciate it. It's always a pleasure to come out and hang out with you and get this look at a brand new display, brand new technology, Quantum Dot. And I mean, you can't see it from where you're sitting.
This is remarkable what I'm seeing. And then these laser lights, I mean, the whole thing is just remarkable. So we couldn't have planned that better. Yeah. Thank you, Joey.
So for MixingLight.com, I'm Patrick Inhofer. I'm here with Bram Desmet, CEO of Flanders Scientific. And we've been talking about the FSI XMP-550 Quantum Dot OLED.
2023-06-07