One can’t go to NAB or look at a monitor nowadays without some talk about Bit Depth and LUTs (Color Lookup Tables.) Whether it’s the HP Dreamcolor Monitor, or the latest Cinetal LCD concoction, the question arises about color fidelity and manipulation. Does it support 1D LUTs or 3D LUTs? What kind of LUTs can I generate?

After talking with manufacturers of panels like eCinema Systems, Cinetal, and Panasonic, it seems like all the panels have basically the same hardware. The big manufacturers like NEC and LG setup a factory line and then produce literally thousands of screens over the course of 6 months. Then, they shut it down, and reset it for the next panel.

The main difference between a model from Cinetal or anyone else who uses the same panel from NEC, is the backlighting and digital processing software built-in to the screen. So, if a screen has the ability to display a choice of 16 million colors, then the big difference is how it chooses what colors to display, and how it deals with lighting for getting the best quality blacks and whites.

The human eye can resolve about 10 million colors and 530 billion steps of gradations, but, the best monitors out there can only resolve about 1 billion steps of gradation. A printed image or film slide can map more than 530 billion.

So, how do you decide what colors we want to show on the display?

This is where the magic of the monitor’s software comes in handy. It makes a display more versatile for mapping a set of colors from an image to the closest set of colors the display can actually show. All a Lookup Table is, is a set of numbers that map one possible color to another. So, if I have autumn stone cherry red, but the display can only resolve a candy cherry red, then the display can map the color to the closest representation we want.

But, the fun doesn’t stop there. If you know that you will go to a print, and that some other processing may be done down the line for a print to give it a “scary movie” look, then you could add another lookup table that then gives it a dark de-saturated look that more closely represents what your final print will look like.

So, it can be used for correcting the display, and creatively altering the overall look to give a style to the overall image.

For client viewing at Bling Imaging, we’ve found the best displays to give many gradations and an excellent balance of contrast are Plasma displays. By adding a Cinetal Davio, or an HD Link Pro from Blackmagic Design to a Panasonic Pro Plasma Broadcast Monitor we can upload 3D LUTs to process the color before the the output to the display.

There is no one master solution, though, it really depends upon what monitor gives you best results in your viewing environment. That said, having the ability to add display LUTs is a major advantage.