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Nebtek SolarHD 7-SC


Charles Papert

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Time to start talking about this monitor!

 

I received mine last week in anticipation of a shoot that went away (grr) but took it on its maiden voyage last night with my little rig and the Canon 1DMKIV. Thus I can't report on the real-world daylight performance just yet, but I can say that the image was beautiful, bright and sharp. The Canon DSLR's have an annoying characteristic of squeezing the preview image down to a small window, but the Solar offered plenty of zoom and resizing options, and in conjunction with the underscan feature I was able to dial in an exact match that blew up the image perfectly.

 

It's really nice to have hard buttons for so many features that would often be relegated to menus. For various functions, these become alternate keys with legends on the screen above the button.

 

I'm still new to the world of color LCD's for Steadicam, but last night I know for sure that I made certain choices based on what I was able to see for the first time, both due to resolution and color information. For instance, the amazing sensitivity of the 1D pulled out a subtle patch of red in a cloud (in night sky!) in the background and thus I was able to place it adjacent to the talent in my final frame. This would have simply been a happy accident with my green screen, something I wouldn't have known about until dailies.

 

Incidentally the frameline and level indicator firmware is still in the works for the near future, Gaylen is posting updates about it and anyone who buys the monitor now will be able to send it in for the upgrade once available.

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  • 4 weeks later...
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I don't want to speak for him but the dates he's told me are not distant. There's always the possibility of hangups in the programming phase so it's smart for him not to promise anything publicly. I'm glad I got the unit ahead of time as it will be but a minor inconvenience to have to send it back for the upgrade, meanwhile I'm getting the opportunity to put it through its paces and work on bugs with Gaylen as I find them (two minor ones so far and both have been resolved in the latest firmware).

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I talked with some of the people at Nebtek yesterday...

I would like to clarify something. While there is a digital level in the works for this monitor, it will be an additional box that gets mounted on the rig. It gets plugged into your sleds 8 pin lemo and then it plugs into your monitor. [it seems to sound much like the external XCS PDL except that it will also work in HDSDI mode]

They did not have a cost for this yet as it is not finished yet.

rich

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It gets plugged into your sleds 8 pin lemo and then it plugs into your monitor. [it seems to sound much like the external XCS PDL except that it will also work in HDSDI mode]

 

Does that mean that HD-SDI will run through the 8-pin monitor Lemo and not on a seperate BNC?

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Solar7 has a 1/4" 20 mount on the bottom (via brass insert, much more durable than the typical sheet metal threads in many monitors); there are mounting holes for optional brass inserts that can mount on the sides and top, giving you a lot of configurations. You can buy from Nebtek a connecting piece that allows it to mount to the standard monitor spigot. They also have a yoke for the monitor.

 

See my post from the 28th on the frameline and level delivery dates--"soon" is about as good as it will be for now. Most of the uphill work has been done and it's mostly in the testing phase, which is good news.

 

I like the monitor quite a bit.

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