How Reference Monitors Are Built And Why It Matters: Chatting with FSI's Bram Desmet

Your image deserves honesty, not “enhancements,” when viewed on a professional display. We sit down with Bram Desmet, CEO of Flanders Scientific, to explore how true reference monitors are built and why that difference matters every time a client asks, “Is this correct?” From ditching mass-market chipsets in favor of custom FPGAs to calibrating each unit individually, Bram lifts the hood on a process designed for one goal: confidence in every pixel.

We break down the journey from panel sourcing to firmware, and why QD-OLED is shifting the landscape for colorists and DITs alike. You’ll hear how FSI’s Gaia Color AutoCal allows you to plug a probe directly into the display, run its own test patches, and map thousands of states from a single master calibration, without a laptop or third-party software. We also dig into the practical wins of QD-OLED: additive RGB for white, exceptional off-axis stability, strong HDR performance, and multiple sizes that make single-monitor rooms a reality.

We also talk brightness and the future of reference displays. Is 4,000 nits the sweet spot for HDR grading, or should we be chasing 10,000? Bram shares his thoughts on the creative value of headroom, and why broad QD-OLED adoption across TVs, gaming, phones, and automotive gives this technology real staying power. We chat about the “panel lottery,” FSI’s quality-control safeguards, and why every unit ships with verified calibration reports. We also touch on how one accurate display in the finishing suite helps teams focus on creative intent instead of negotiating screen differences.

If you care about color accuracy, translation, and saving hours of guesswork, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share with a fellow color nerd, and leave a review telling us what your current monitoring setup looks like and what you’re upgrading next.

Guest Links:

IG – https://www.instagram.com/bramrdesmet/

Website – https://www.flandersscientific.com/

PixelTools
Modern Color Grading Tools and Presets for DaVinci Resolve 

Flanders Scientific Inc. (FSI)
High-Quality Reference Displays for Editors, Colorists and DITS

DeMystify Color
Color Training and Color Grading Tools

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Welcome And The Case For One Display

Speaker 1 0:00

I can make that match perfect for you, but a client may walk in the room and they may see slightly differently. They may be an older observer who has more macular degeneration, or they have more yellowing of the lens in their eye, or they may just be genetically different and see slightly different because the distribution of uh rods and cones in their eye might be different than yours. So those things make perceptual matching quite difficult. Now, what's a lot easier is you have one display in the room. If that's all anybody looks at, then typically these discussions about which display is right kind of go away, right? Because there's nothing else to reference.

What Makes A Reference Monitor Different

Speaker 0:36

Welcome to Color and Coffee, a podcast that's focused on the craft of color and the artist behind it. I'm your host, Jason Bowdach, and each episode we'll sit down with some of the most talented artists in the industry and have a casual chat from one artist to another. We'll share their stories, their insights, their tips, and maybe even a little gear talk. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started, join us for some great color discussion. Sit back, relax, you're listening to Color and Coffee. Hello, and welcome to this episode of Color and Coffee. I'm your host, Jason Bowdach, and I can't wait to introduce you to today's guest. His name is Bram Desmet, and he is the CEO of Flanders Scientific. Now, in this episode, we're going to talk about what goes into creating a reference monitor and where he sees the monitor realm going. So, welcome to the show, Brom.

Speaker 1 1:36

Thanks so much for having me, Jason. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1:38

Truly my pleasure. And first off, I have to thank you so much for being a sponsor of the show. We could not be around without your support.

Speaker 1 1:45

Happy to do it.

Speaker 1:46

So let's jump right in. For those that are not aware, Flanders Scientifics makes some of the best monitors in the business, whether you're a DIT on set or you're in the color suite. That has nothing to do with them sponsoring the episode. I just happen to love their monitors. So let's jump into what goes into making a reference monitor. How do you guys start with doing something like that? Because I know a lot of people don't quite understand the complicated process of creating a reference monitor and what makes them so expensive.

FPGAs, Custom Code, And Small-Batch Craft

Speaker 1 2:14

I oftentimes joke that it's it's less about what we put in rather than what we don't put in, right? So a lot of the kind of consumer or prosumer type displays on the market, they're all using similar processors. Typically, they'll they'll buy a processor from from MediaTech that kind of does everything. The problem with those is that their aim is oftentimes a lot different than our aim in the professional sphere, right? So we want to show you as much as possible your image for what it really is. So we don't do things like noise reduction, we don't do anything like a artificial gamma boost or or saturation boosts or special gamut mapping or anything like this that is meant to uh enhance the picture in quotes there. So to do all this without relying on one of these kind of generic chips makes things a lot more expensive and difficult to do because essentially what we're doing is purchasing FPGAs and we are programming everything from the ground up. So all the video processing, all the ancillary features, all of that is really code from us from the ground up. And that's a lot different than you know, again, using a MediaTek chip and skinning it slightly differently. And so you'll see a dozen similar-looking consumer displays that all kind of look and perform the same, and that's not an accident, it's because they all use this kind of underlying similar chipset. So that's part of the challenge is doing these things and obviously kind of at a at a custom level, but also obviously in much, much smaller quantities. You know, we're not selling millions or hundreds of thousands of displays, even you're typically selling things in the hundreds or thousands in this market because it simply isn't that big, especially when you get to these higher-end HDR grading monitors. It's actually a very, very niche space. And so to build something for that, it's labor-intensive and requires just a lot of work in terms of both the hardware and the firmware design. So, and then our primary aims are always the same thing. And when we first build a new series of monitors, what's the first thing that we focus on? Is color accuracy. So we want to make sure that we are as accurate as possible. And then we start typically rolling in ancillary features. So if you look at a series like the DM series, which we've had out for 10 plus years, there's tons of additional features in that because we've had time to add those based on user requests or things that we thought might be a good idea. So you find a lot of like niche feature sets in these things as well, like a pixel measurement feature, a CIE diagram, all sorts of different scopes. So that's kind of how we roll in terms of development. Uh, a lot of it is based on, again, user feedback and just, you know, knowing the industry well and building something that really is catered specifically towards this business.

Speaker 4:49

That is incredibly interesting. I was going to be my first question is do you guys make your own chips and are you guys programming them? And you essentially answered that is I have right now uh one of the monitors I have in front of me is the ASUS PA32 UCDM, if I uh have my memory correct. And a lot of people navigate to this monitor because it's very commonly understood that it has the same panel as a lot of the FSIs, but that's just part of the equation. You might have the same panel, but what is the signal going to that panel and how do you prep that signal?

Accuracy First, Then Features

Speaker 1 5:21

Exactly. And I think the other big thing that goes into this is that we don't think that that's a bad thing, that there are all uh computer displays and or the case of the larger monitors, consumer TVs that use the similar or same panels. That ubiquity of the technology is actually a strength, not a weakness, because it means that things translate well to those other applications. And also we realize that, you know, not everybody's gonna buy a $12,000 monitor to do every step of the process, right? So we love the idea that people can go out and buy these kind of more consumer or prosumer type monitors for VFX, maybe some editorial type applications. And then when it comes to really color critical monitoring on set for high-end color grading applications, that's where we think the professional reference monitor really comes in. And you do sort of get what you pay for. Obviously, these things come in at a premium. They also, again, take us a lot of time and effort to do this and to get it right. And ultimately, what we always tell people is what we sell, what any other professional reference monitor manufacturer is selling you, is confidence that the image is correct, right? So, yes, you can use some of these other solutions, but then it becomes a little bit of a science experiment. How comfortable are you calibrating? You know, have you used color space? Have you usal man? Do you have the calibration probes to do this? Do you know how to use that software? And you can do a good job with those things, but there are just a lot of caveats, a lot of ways where you can go wrong. So you just have to be a little bit more careful. Where with us, you get something that's correct out of the box. We have spent years developing our Gaia Color Auto Cal, which is one of the things that sets us apart more than anything else. You plug a probe directly into the monitor, it generates all the test patches, it calibrates for thousands of possible combinations of selections on the monitor, all from this one master calibration. You don't have to be a calibration expert to do it. You don't have to have standalone software, you don't have to break out a computer. And then if you are challenged with operating in a novel space for the first time, like for example, if you've never done an HLG project and someone goes, Hey, by the way, we actually need to finish this for HLG, not PQ or not Rec709 or whatever it is, you're just making a new menu selection, right? You're not breaking out a computer and having to recalibrate. You just make the new selection and you're instantly there at that correct space. So those are kind of some of the things that we think we bring to the table for the post community. And then obviously for DITs, we have a lot of niche features like the ability to do four inputs into a monitor, see them all on screen at the same time, have each quadrant have its own unique color space selection. Those are really powerful features that you don't find on most consumer, prosumer type displays. So again, again, we realize it's not the monitor for everybody, but there's a lot to be said for having confidence in the image and having something that's easy to use, easy to navigate, and that you can trust.

Speaker 7:58

First off, I've had FSI monitors for a while. I don't have one right now, but uh I've had them for a while, and I did not know that you can have different color space settings per quadrant on set. That's absolutely incredible.

Same Panel, Different Results

Speaker 1 8:08

Yeah, so that that's new on the XMP series that actually went into public beta uh just a couple of weeks ago. So it's available for anybody to download and try, and they'll probably become our official shipping firmware version in a month or so. But yeah, it's really cool because you can actually now see HDR and SDR side by side if you want. You can see different color gamuts, different EOTS. Everything is customizable per quadrant. And that's just it's a very powerful feature, especially when you're on set with you know a DP who maybe wants to make sure they're protecting well for HDR and SDR, lighting well for both of those scenarios. It just gives you an easy way to visualize this. I'm not a fan of doing this in a post environment. I think you should look at HDR and then SDR, not side by side and certainly not on the same display because your eyes just don't work that way. Adaptation works well to one or the other. But for DITs, cost and space onset are really big factors. You're not doing final color there anyway. It's more about just making sure something hasn't broken in that pipeline using your HDR show LUT, your SDR show LUT, whatever it is that you're doing. It's an invaluable tool for these guys to be able to use this in a very compact and affordable way.

Speaker 9:15

I think you nailed on something that I've personally had trouble with, which is trust. And that's something that I have to explain to clients all the time. That is when you come into a professional color bay, there is hopefully the colorist has nailed down the monitor and they can trust it. As opposed to your MacBook or a random desktop monitor or consumer monitor, and even a high-end consumer monitor. There is not the trust with the signal that you can have with a reference monitor where I know that pixel by pixel it's going in there and I am seeing my ones and zeros displayed exactly on screen, as you you mentioned. There's no Media Tech chip or any other chip in there doing something behind the scenes to make it look good because everybody thinks that they're doing the best job, but actually they're not doing what I want, which is I just want to see the data. I don't want to see what you think I want.

Confidence Versus DIY Calibration

Speaker 1 10:06

Exactly. And the the issue too with a lot of those is like when you get to the consumer chips, they're what we found in testing some of those is when you select a certain feature to be off, it doesn't actually turn off in a lot of instances. It goes into the low mode. And so that's always a fun, kind of challenging thing. And we've seen this a lot with like doing like uh analysis of noise reduction algorithms that are built into some of these chips. You'll go to the off mode and you're like, well, there's still obviously some sort of noise reduction going on here. And that's not necessarily what you want, right? Because as a professional monitor, if there is noise in the signal, you want to see that because it's your job then to fix it, as opposed to uh having the monitor do it and then having that be done in a variable way on every other display downstream. You just want to take care of the signal and make sure the signal is as high quality as possible and the content as high quality as possible when you deliver it. So yeah, it's again a niche application, but uh, you know, we've been doing this for 20 plus years now, and there's definitely a market for it.

Speaker 11:02

So I think not only is there a market for it, I think that there is a lack of understanding of how critical it is. So for instance, I went from you guys, I had a DM240, I loved it, to be honest. I'm a little sad I got rid of it and didn't put it over to the side because I had that trust. And now moving over to consumer monitors, I don't necessarily have the buttons and the menus that I had before. I have to fiddle and I have to turn things off, which I'm not really sure are off. It says it's off in the menu, but is it really off? Because when I'm calibrating, it's not getting quite there. And being able to be 100% sure that something is off or that the setting is correct is a critical feature that I can turn to my client and they say, Is this what it is? Or is this HDR, is this PQ, or is this HLG? And I can say 100% certain, look them straight in the face and say, Yes, this is what we are looking at. Because I'm sure you've heard before, people come in from the edit suite looking for a show let or working with log footage, and they go, That's not what my movie looks like. And a lot of the times you have to tell them, actually, this is what it looks like. But this is not a problem. We can go from here. This is just a starting point. And being able to get them one to trust this golden monitor, and two, to trust you that we're gonna take it to a place that you want. And then they leave your suite and go somewhere else and say, Oh, it doesn't look right. And you have to basically tell them, well, that's a consumer monitor and it's gonna go out into the world and it's never gonna look quite as good as we saw it in the color suite, is a really important basically trust that you need to establish with your client. And getting that with a consumer grade electronic is difficult. I have trouble doing that.

Gaia Color AutoCal And Workflows

Speaker 1 12:39

Yeah, and it's not it's not impossible to get yourself in a good ballpark or even to make it spot on in some cases. But then the other question is, especially with so many people being kind of freelanced these days, is you know, what's your time worth, right? So how confident are you in your abilities? Uh and I've met some people who've done fantastic jobs calibrating monitors, but I've also seen people take big missteps. And so the question is, yeah, you save a few thousand dollars and then you do a project and you realize you exported a LUT incorrectly or you selected the wrong range when profiling, and now you're doing that whole project over, and what does that cost you? So it's again, it's not impossible. I don't try to pretend that it's you know impossible to get a consumer TV or consumer monitor to do a decent job. It's just again, what's your time worth? How confident are you? Those are real world considerations as well.

Speaker 13:26

Absolutely. And I think the the more technologically savvy you are, the easier it is to do that. But you put the nail on a head right there. What would you rather be doing? Would you rather be doing another job for a client, or would you rather be second guessing your monitor and having to reconfigure it? But there's also another consideration in that there are different monitor types. There's LCD, there's OLED, there's QD OLED, and there's innate differences between them. And without fully understanding the differences between those monitors, it's also hard to calibrate between those, correct?

Quad View And On‑Set Utility

Speaker 1 13:59

Yeah, it can be difficult. And there's a lot to be said for choosing a technology that balances accuracy, but also wow factor, right? Especially if you have clients who are ever coming in the room. So the nice thing about LCDs, static backlight LCDs, is that they tend to be quite linear. They tend to be very easy to calibrate typically, but they usually don't offer the kind of wow factor that clients are looking for. OLEDs, on the other hand, have a lot of wow factor. Typically, a client will see something on an OLED and they're looking at that contrast and like, wow, my content looks really good. The issue with OLEDs are that there are lots of different OLED technologies, and some like W OLED tend to do an okay job of mimicking kind of reference behavior at SDR levels, but for HDR levels, you do have this kind of color volume collapse issue to worry about. You don't have that with RGBO LEDs. The problem with RGBO LEDs is most of them historically have not gotten bright enough to be used for HDR applications. There were some exceptions. The X300 from Sony was an exception, but it's also hyper-expensive. QDO LED is kind of really interesting because it gives you a lot of the benefit of RGBO LED, the wow factor that people have had from WO LEDs and other OLED technologies, but it is a purely additive system. So it's RGB additive for white, you don't have the color volume collapse. So it is more of a reference technology. And it's an OLED technology that's available in a wide variety of sizes. And that's always been kind of a sticking point with a lot of other technologies, whether that's light modulating cell layer, you know, those 31-inch, 1000-knit capable displays that have been used as reference monitors, or if you've had, you know, a variety of different technologies, a lot of times they're stuck with just one or two sizes. So QDO LED is really great. And one of the reasons we've standardized on it is that we can use it all the way down to a 26.5 inch and all the way up to a 65-inch monitor. So that means you can get large monitors for post, you can get smaller monitors for set, you can get kind of in-between sizes for editorial, for VFX, all these different applications. And so that I think is kind of new in the industry because typically we've had this issue of pairing a one technology as the consumer or the client viewing monitor, and then another one as the mastering monitor. And then you get into the even more challenging thing. If you think calibrating one display by yourself is hard, now try doing two technologies or two different technologies in the same room and trying to get them to visually or perceptually match each other. It's a whole other thing. I mean, they're calibrators who made great money just going around and doing nothing but this, like specializing in perceptually matching two different technologies. But an even easier path is to either use two displays of the same technology. So if you have a small QDO LED and a large one, or even better, uh, because QDO LED has such great off-access viewing, just use one monitor in the room. And that's something we really haven't been able to do previously because there weren't large monitors that were large enough for client viewing that you could trust as your primary reference. And now you can because QDO LED offers reference performance in these ginormous sizes.

Speaker 16:54

Yeah, I noticed recently you guys uh now have up to 65-inch QDO LEDs, which I think is absolutely incredible. And all the way down to what's the smallest size you guys have for QDO LED?

Speaker 1 17:05

26.5 right now. So we have 26.5, a 31.5, a 55, and a 65. So four sizes to choose from.

Speaker 17:12

So the whole range essentially, you don't have to sacrifice on the different display technology. Now, uh, can you explain a little bit more about perceptual matching? Because I'm not sure everybody is familiar with that. Like what is that and how is that different from just plain old calibration?

Trust In The Suite And Hidden Processing

Time, Risk, And The Cost Of Being Wrong

Speaker 1 17:28

Well, so fundamentally, you would think that if you had given two displays, if you calibrate them to the same measured values using even a very high-end probe, like a spectroradiometer or something like this, if you measure the same XY, for example, for white, you would think that they should look the same. The problem is that if the spectral power distribution, kind of the underlying fingerprints of the monitor, the light output from the monitor is different, you can get into situations where they might measure the same, but they don't actually look the same. And there are a few different things that go into this. So one of them is that unfortunately, all of our modern-day video standards are still based around CIE 1931 color matching functions. And as the name implies, those are almost 100 years old at this point. Uh, and those color matching functions aren't perfectly accurate, right? So, what you'll get is that if you use that color science, that underlying color matching function, if you rely on that to get a match between different types of spectral power distributions, different types of display technologies, they won't actually match. Now, there are more recent color matching functions. Most of the industry has heard about things like the Judd Voss offset and whatnot, which is kind of a halfway implementation of an alternate color matching function. But there have been newer color matching functions that color scientists have worked on that gets us better agreement between different types of spectral power distributions, or again, light sources from displays, for example. And those have helped. But even with the newest ones, you still will get into situations where even the best color matching functions available will still fail to provide a perfect match between different display technologies for all observers. And the question is, well, why does that happen? And the answer is that there is genuine observer variability, right? So you might see color slightly different than I see color. So we can do a perfect match for me. I could have bronze color matching functions, and those will match any two displays well if we use that. But then Jason walks in the room and maybe he's a slightly different type of observer. And so these color matching functions are always kind of averages of how people see, but there is genuine variability. So perceptual matching is this process of hey, we use the best color science available, we get things as close as possible as a starting point, and then we basically look at some footage, look at some test patches, and we fine-tune one display to be a better perceptual match. So they won't measure the same anymore, but they will look the same to that operator. And that is actually quite effective and it works quite well. The conundrum here, and the reason I prefer to have a single display in the room if I can, as opposed to multiple displays, is that again, I can make that match perfect for you, but a client may walk in the room and they may see slightly differently. They may be an older observer who has more macular degeneration, or they have more yellowing of the lens in their eye, or they may just be genetically different and see slightly different because the distribution of uh rods and codes in their eye might be different than yours. So those things make perceptual matching quite difficult. Now, what's a lot easier is you have one display in the room. If that's all anybody looks at, then typically these discussions about which display is right kind of go away, right? Because there's nothing else to reference. And it doesn't matter so much at that point if you see slightly differently from me, because we're all just looking at this one display. And what the human eye is really good at is these comparative judgments, right? You put two displays next to each other and even small differences you can see. If you're just looking at one thing without anything else to reference, your eye's not a spectro, right? It doesn't go, oh, well, that X coordinate's off by blah, blah, blah. No, it's just like, yeah, that looks pretty normal to me. So unless you're like a severely anomalous viewer, if we're all just looking at one display technology and it's calibrated correctly, these issues of needing to perceptually match or or concerns about actually a display tend to go away.

Speaker 21:23

That's a really, I mean, I'm glad that we're starting to go away from that. I've heard of a lot of people having to match Sonys to Sonys, and even there they're really close, but it's painful because especially when you have a client in the room, especially if the client is female, because females tend to have better color accuracy than males just genetically. And it's difficult to overcome that in the sense that what are you supposed to do if they see differently? Well, you can make it so that it looks better for them, but I mean, it's you're just arguing against the wall there.

Speaker 1 21:50

We've been at this game of having to perceptually match for a long time because there was simply no other avenue because the large displays were always one technology and the smaller displays were another. But it And again, with QDO LED, that is no longer the case. You can get two different sizes, but even better, just because even if they're the same technology, the other thing we have to be cognizant of is that you may see color differently based on how much of your field of view is occupied by the display, right? You could have two entirely similar SPDs, but if you're viewing a 55-inch that's occupying a huge chunk of your field of view versus a 31 that's occupying a much smaller field of view, you can still get perceptual differences there. So having one display just makes life a lot easier.

Speaker 22:31

Absolutely. And I mean, that's really nice that we've come such a long way. And I mean, obviously, you still have to make differences when you're doing for a theatrical distribution versus uh home. But I mean, we now need to have two different monitors in the room now, other than SDR and HDR. You can essentially flip the same monitor over.

Speaker 1 22:48

Exactly.

Speaker 22:49

So that's a significant improvement from even, would you say, two years ago?

LCD, OLED, QD‑OLED Tradeoffs

Speaker 1 22:53

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we were basically two, two and a half years ago is when we started doing large format QDO LEDs. And it's difficult, right? Because it changes how you design rooms. So it doesn't work in every room and realize a lot of rooms are still going to have to use two displays. But for people designing new rooms, there's this at least this opportunity to go to a single monitor room. And we're starting to see some adoption of that where it's become a little bit more favorable and it really solves this problem of the colorist having to play color scientist and psychologist to their client and say, don't worry that these don't look the same. We're gonna, you know, your content is safe with me. If you just look at one display, I mean, I can't tell you how much heard people say that just simplifies their lives because all those discussions go away, and we can really focus on what we care about, which is, hey, what's your creative intent here? How do you want this to look?

Speaker 23:41

That's amazing. And I think a lot of people should take that in mind if you're doing a new color suite to try and do a single monitor if possible. I think it's a lot easier. It's obviously I've worked my entire career with having a close monitor and obviously the client having a further one unless you're doing a projector, but it is something I would love to move away from because it's so much easier to not have to worry about that difference and knowing that the client is looking at a less, almost an inferior image because you are settling down with they're probably looking at a consumer display, or even if it was a reference, it's a reference of a different technology, and you're having to do in your head the difference of slightly more green or it's less contrasty or whatever the difference in the tech is. Exactly. Yeah. So where do you see monitor technology going now that we have sort of settled in on a single technology? We've been seeing it get brighter and brighter. Where do you see us going now? Do you see us continuing to get brighter and brighter up to the 10,000 nits, or do you see us sort of settling down? You already have a 4,000 nit monitor. Do you think we're gonna sort of settle there, or do you think we're gonna continue to get brighter?

One Technology Across Many Sizes

Perceptual Matching Explained

Speaker 1 24:44

I think there's gonna be a push for um for brighter displays, especially in the small sizes, right? So you're right, we we now have a 55-inch that is capable of 4,000 nits peak uh luminance on that display. But on the smaller ones, we're still at 1,000 nits. So I think there will be a push to start making those brighter and brighter if possible. I do think 4,000 nits is a good benchmark. I think there are severe diminishing returns after 4,000 nits, considering the additional cost that goes into trying to get above that. And when I say cost, I don't necessarily mean just financially, but also in terms of power consumption, heat generation, these types of things. And we see that a lot of clients have actually quite happy at a thousand nits, even, right? So 4,000 nits is already a stretch. So I think there is some motivation to go brighter and brighter. There's more you can do creatively if you're given that opportunity. And one thing that I do like about QDOLA technology, which obviously we've anchored ourselves to quite a bit here, is that it has evolved sharply, right? So a little over two years ago, we introduced a 2,000 net 55 inch. Now we're already at a 4,000 net 55 inch. So there's more and more sizes coming. We've seen that we started at a 55, then we introduced a 65, then a 31, then a 26. So we've gone from one size to four in just a couple of years. We've gone to writer, obviously. But QDO led it's another important kind of distinction, right? So the things that I like about it, obviously, off-access viewing, the fact that it's purely RGB additive for white, the ubiquity of the technology, the fact that it's not just for our industry and that you can get it as consumer devices. So there's this huge market for it. And then the fact that the technology keeps evolving and evolving at a rather rapid pace. And I think those are all healthy signs for the technology. Because one thing our industry has been plagued with is that panel manufacturers, semiconductor manufacturers will make something very niche for us. They'll make a full array local dimming backlight, or we'll have to make our own full array local dimming backlight, or they'll do a light modulating cell layer panel or an RGB OLED panel. And these things are only ever sold in our market. And the problem is our market's not big enough to sustain these semiconductor manufacturers. So they all give up because they go, look, we can't run a panel production line that is only making hundreds or thousands of displays a year. We need to be making hundreds of thousands or millions if we can. And with QDOLED, because there are so many applications, you know, medical, GUI monitors, gaming monitors, all these different TVs, outdoors, everything. There's all these other applications for it. It really means that they are able to do that sort of volume that means the technology is not going anywhere. So that should give us a little bit of peace of mind in our industry because we've seen so many technologies come and go. This has a lot of staying power. And then looking at the long-term horizon, prognosticating a bit here on what is to come, I think the holy grail of display technologies, and this can change. These things can evaporate overnight and something else new comes along. But ELQD, based on what I've seen, is kind of the most interesting kind of potential future technology, probably not commercially available for at least another five years. But that's electroluminescent quantum dot. So instead of using an OLED layer to excite the quantum dots, you actually just use electrons directly. So you essentially light up the QDs directly. And what's cool about that is that it's going to offer a lot of display performance benefits. But because it's still ultimately quantum dot-based, it's going to make for a really smooth transition from QDOLA to ELQD if that ever comes, because the SPDs will be relatively similar. That's a really kind of neat thing that's happening with the adoption of quantum dot technology, is that you tend to get more similarity as you get an evolution of the technology. You don't have this like sharply different SPD where suddenly everything you graded for the last 10 years looks a lot different. So I don't know that that's be my guess as to what's coming in the next five plus years or so. But in the interim, QDO LED is set to keep improving. We're going to see basically every year or two, you see further improvements in terms of peak luminance, size options, color gamut, all these sorts of characteristics.

Speaker 28:49

That's amazing to hear because I have a little bit of a scar tissue from the J OLED. I mean, for those that are not aware, J uh J OLED was a technology that was really perfect for the time. The LG EP950 was based off that. It only went up to like 700 nits, but they completely went under and basically they were not able to, like Bram said, produce the amount of panels that were needed to stay in business and they just folded. And so we lost those monitors entirely.

Speaker 1 29:17

Unfortunately, that happens quite a bit. I mean, you had the same thing with the Sony RGBO led panels that were used in the E250 and those types of monitors, but also in our own displays, like the DM250, CM250, which were very popular monitors. But yeah, the issue again with these semiconductor manufacturers is that they only ever got uptake from our market, maybe a little bit in medical, but there was no big consumer uptake of the technology. To give you an idea of the staying power of quantum. It's much more than you get than you've had with these other technologies, where maybe a J OLED or Sony dumped maybe $500 million or something like this into a small pilot line to get the technology out into our markets. With SDC, the manufacturer of the quantum. They've invested a lot. And again, the technology continues to evolve, which is a telltale sign that it's not a static technology and that there is a lot of growth for this technology in the future.

Speaker 30:14

When you say consumer devices, I think their first thought is like, oh, it's the Samsung TV and the consumer TV that we're seeing at Costco. Is that what else are you talking about with consumer? Because I know, I mean, I'm looking at two Stream Decks. If I'm not mistaken, they also use OLED panels for the dots. Is it that? Is it what else are using these OLED panels, other than obviously the first thing of our TVs?

Speaker 1 30:36

Yeah, so TVs are a big one, obviously, like you said, but also just gaming monitors uh are increasingly becoming OLED or QDO LED on the IT side of things with the standard RGBO LEDs so not quantum. But RGBO LEDs, which we also use in products like our DM160, for example, which is a 16-inch OLED. But there's a huge market for that. So SDC, who provides the QDO LED panels for the larger sizes, they're also a manufacturer of RGB OLEDs. And one of their biggest markets is actually phones. So if you look at you know iPhones, those types of things, they're all using OLED-based displays as well. So phones, tablets, regular computer displays, gaming displays, those sort of types of things. And then the other big thing is automotive. And that's something that it's something most of the semiconductor manufacturers try to cater to, but it's a hard market to break into. So this is something that J OLED tried to do. J OLED was trying to get uptake into the automotive market, but they just didn't succeed particularly well at that. But a very successful semiconductor manufacturer that's making panels for the consumer markets out there, those are the things they're looking at. They're looking at automotive, they're looking at computer displays, they're looking at TVs. Those are the big markets.

Speaker 32:19

That makes perfect sense for automotive because you're outside, it needs to be bright, it needs to be viewable from all different accesses, no matter what. And I mean, the colors, it would be nice if they're accurate, but it's not the first preference. Really, it needs to be bright and it needs to be viewable from off-access. That's totally. That makes perfect sense. Thank you for that clarification. Because I think the first thing we think about is oh, it's TVs are selling pretty well. I don't know why this is doing it, but I think that's just the first thought about it. When in fact, I think phones and automotive and other uses, like you're saying, are actually a bigger seller.

Single‑Monitor Rooms And Client Psychology

Speaker 1 32:52

Absolutely. I mean, those are huge markets. I mean, the TV business is also not tiny, obviously, but it's a very cutthroat business, very, very thin margins. And so what you see is a lot of it actually has been a little good for us in that what's happened is these premium panel suppliers like SDC have started to focus more on these premium technologies and trying not to compete in the commodity space of like really cheap LCDs. You know, they're not interested in making panels that are going into $300 TV. What they're interested in doing is these higher quality, premium kind of tier products and then eventually working the price down over time so that they can start to sell into some of these more commodity spaces. But they always start kind of tip of the spear, you know, what's the kind of highest level of performance we can get? And those are the markets that they try to cater to first.

Speaker 33:37

So let's jump into something a little bit different. When you guys are starting to create a new monitor, what is the process that you guys go to to like essentially start doing that? Because I've asked you guys for a while, like before you guys came out with the 31-inch, I had a DM240 and I was like, I love this thing, but I need something bigger and in 4K. And for years you guys were not able to do that. And I get that now. It makes complete sense. So what are you guys looking for? Other obviously you need the panel, but then you start making that custom board, correct?

Brightness Roadmap And 4,000‑Nit Ceilings

QD‑OLED’s Staying Power And Markets

Speaker 1 34:10

Yeah, I mean, really, we can build a monitor or prototype a monitor very quickly once we find the right panel. There's really the the biggest thing for us is panel evaluations, looking for new panel technologies, and then trying to get access to it. Because that's not a trivial matter for our business as well, because it's very hard to get the attention of somebody selling hundreds of thousands of panels to a TV manufacturer when you go, hey, we'd love to buy 500 or a thousand of these. They kind of look at you like, oh, that's cute. So it's difficult. And so part of the process is one, evaluating things, making sure that they're good enough for our market because we do have probably the toughest clients out there, right? So people making color critical decisions that are the most discerning users out there. So panel evaluation is the real big one, and then also talking to these semiconductor manufacturers and trying to kind of sell ourselves in terms of, you know, what's the benefit of working for us? Well, you get the prestige of working or selling monitors into the really high-end Hollywood space. They all kind of want that prestige factor. And then the other thing is just the feedback that we offer, right? Again, because we have some of the toughest clients and because we are rather tough in our evaluation metrics, we go back to them and sell them all the things that we don't like and that we wish they would improve in the future. And so I think we have some key partnerships with that, with a few different semiconductor manufacturers who make the panels, and that's been very beneficial. That's usually a long process. So it took us 18 months of meetings before we had access to uh quantum.oled panels to give you an idea. And in that time, we were, of course, doing evaluations as well and seeing if they met our needs. Once we do find a good panel, we try to typically slot it into an existing architecture. So the DM series is a great example, right? So the DM architectures, it's a very old platform, actually. It's been around for quite a while. But as we find new panels, those typically slot in pretty easily, and there's usually not too much additional work there. We kind of optimize the autocal system for this display technology. That takes a little bit of time. The XMP series were kind of interesting, that was new for us. We really want to develop a new platform to really support what the things that we wanted to do with 4K UHD resolution, HDR displays. So that was a good bit of ground up work to redo those. And honestly, one of the most time-consuming things on the XMP series was the optimization of the Gaia Color Auto Cal system. So that system takes over a thousand readings during the process, and we build out all the targets from there. Like I mentioned, this one master calibration essentially that takes you to all positions on the monitor. But one of the key things to do, and one of the reasons we're able to make Gaia Color work so efficiently and target these places very accurately, or these targets very accurately, is that we spend a lot of time optimizing the test patch sequence, right? So if you look at how AutoCal runs, it's not just a random sequence of events, right? We actually start with the monitor kind of at SDR levels. We take a certain number of readings, we know what patches we need to read more. So we read more low-end patches than high-end patches. And then we go through also additional stabilization and warm-up steps that are all automated as part of the process. So we stabilize before we start, we warm up before we start for 10 minutes, then the process starts, we generate the SDR test patches, then we bump up a gain level on the monitor and we basically take another series of readings, but we allow for a certain cool down and warm-up period, all things that you have to basically. If you are an independent calibrator trying to do the same thing, you could do this, you could learn how to do this, but it would take a lot of trial and error. And so that's why I always feel bad for the independent calibrator because you have to be able to calibrate every model of monitor out there on the market. Whereas with us, we have kind of the unfair advantage, if you want to think about it, in that we know exactly what it is we're calibrating. So we can do a lot of study and research beforehand and know what test patches are worth measuring, you know, what are what's wasted to, you know, test patches, what don't we need to measure? And then also we can optimize for being able to use more affordable probes. So that's another huge step that we took. So when we first released the XMP series, it was only compatible with higher-end probes like the CR100, like Klein K10A. But a big goal for us was how can we make like a sub-300 probe work as well? And so when you have those sub-300 probes, there are some limitations there, especially on what they can do in the low end. So again, we have the unfair advantage that we know what we're measuring. So, unlike having to use third-party software, what we can do is we can go, look, we've measured thousands of these at this point, right? We know that if they track to this point to the noise floor of that probe, we know that because of how they were tracking above it, it's almost certainly going to track this way below that noise floor. So we can supplement that data. And it really allows us to get very good results in something that costs almost nothing, right? For 280 bucks, no software required, plug it into the monitor, does a trick. The only downside being that still at that point is that those probes are slower, right? So it's gonna take you longer to calibrate. If you own a facility with 100 monitors, you probably do want to invest in the higher end probe and save yourself the time and energy. But if you get just one or two displays, then yeah, just run it overnight, who cares, you know, or go out to lunch while you're calibrating and then you're good to go. And you've only spent 280 bucks on the probe to do the calibration. So those are some of the steps that we've gone through. And then once the platform is kind of out there and we have again, calibration is always our number one thing, right? Signal support, calibration, that's where we start. Then once we have that, we start listening to those feedback. What do users want? And that's where this, you know, quad view thing came up with different color spaces for DITs. DITs kept saying, look, I love this display, but I can't afford, or even if I could afford, I don't want to roll around on a cart with four to eight monitors on it to support the four to eight cameras I had to monitor. So like, I would love to have one or two displays where I can monitor either four or eight signals across these couple of displays, for example. And so we started listening to those things and what people want and then add features that way over time. And again, one of the beautiful things about not being locked into kind of a consumer chipset because everything's built on these FPGs and custom code, is that we can rewrite things, we can add to the code, we can do these new features that might not be possible on other platforms because it is a very, very flexible system for us.

Speaker 40:45

That's a really, really good description. One of the things that I did want to ask you about is something that I think a lot of colorists will be very familiar with if they've ever tried to purchase a consumer-style monitor, and that's what is known as the panel lottery. Yeah. So how do you guys deal with that internally? I'm sure you guys reject a lot of panels. Have you ever like measured a percentage of how many panels you turn away?

From Idea To Monitor: Panel Access And Design

Speaker 1 41:09

So, yeah, it really depends on the technology. One of the reasons we were really happy to, because we did some W O LED panels for a while. So 55 and 65 inch W O LEDs, which we never really marketed as HDR monitors. We said, look, these were SDR reference mastering monitors, and you could use them for like HDR previews, what we'd call it, right? But they weren't HDR mastering monitors. Even with that caveat, near the end of our run in using these W O LED panels, we were rejecting over 50% of the panels that were being delivered to us. So, which is not a figure we like to see because it's costly, right? Because we have to go through the process of evaluating all these displays, sending them back to the display manufacturer, arguing with them about things that don't meet our basic requirements. We are much luckier when it comes to QDO LEDs. The rejection rate on those is much, much lower. The quality of those is much better. But things happen, right? We'll get a panel that just you know doesn't meet the uniformity benchmarks we want or whatever it may be. So we do look at, we evaluate all panels before we put them in monitors. And it depends a bit. You know, some tiers of monitor, we have like really entry-level monitors where our tolerances won't be as tight. So if you buy a $2,500 monitor from us, yeah, we're not going to put kind of the same limitations on that that we'll put on a $24,000 monitor, but we do spend an inordinate amount of time uh actually looking at the panels, evaluating them, and not just slapping whatever in and sending it out into the world. So yeah, it's a lengthy process. The other thing that we do that's kind of related to this, that's different from a lot of consumer brands and not all consumer brands, some consumer brands do some of this, but we do literally calibrate every individual display. We're not loading some generic calibration into it and saying good luck. We are taking the time to do this auto cal process, run it. And then after we're done with that auto cal process, we do the additional evaluations in standalone software with a completely separate probe. And then we send that, those monitors to you with those calibration reports, right? So we check the HDR performance, we check the SDR performance to make sure that that process went well and that you have a verified calibration report showing that it was done accurately. In addition to that, we also spend a lot of time not just with, so we use CalMan to generate those reports internally, but we also do a lot of research using tools like color space. Yeah, right. So we'll do a lot of display evaluation internally and we'll try to figure out, you know, how is a display behaving in a certain region or operating mode or whatever it may be. And then we'll use that to fine-tune things in our own guy of color auto cal process, of course. But yeah, a lot of time and effort goes into it. Again, part of that QC process is we use one probe to do the actual calibration, then we actually use a completely independent probe to verify because something that we've seen in the past is how do you know your one probe isn't broken? So uh so we we cross-check our reference probes, our reference spectrodes against each other weekly. Again, we use independent probes for calibration and QC because if something's happened with those probes, you'll see that in that process. You go, oh, wait a minute, something's not matching up here. And we've had that happen. We've had cleaner who was in in the evening accidentally knock over a probe and then you check it in the morning and you're like, oh wait, suddenly this off, the diffraction grading is shifted or whatever. So we take a lot of care and effort to make sure that those things are correct. And again, it all boils down to the same thing. What are we trying to achieve? Confidence for ourselves, confidence for our end users that they know that the monitor is correct.

Speaker 44:24

I love it. And honestly, that's what I think it's all about is you guys put so much care and effort into making sure that these monitors are reference grade. There's really a lot that goes behind that word reference. And if I'm not mistaken, you guys will give a lifetime calibration for your monitors if you send it back.

Speaker 1 44:40

Yeah, absolutely. So we still offer that. We don't have a ton of people who take us up on that for newer monitors because all of our monitors in our current lineup, the DM series and the XMP series, support our Gaia Color Auto Cal. And because all of these displays can be calibrated with a $280 probe, it usually costs more to send round trip. Certainly, if not that one time, if you do it multiple times over the life of the monitor. So almost everybody's gone to just buying. Probe and doing it in-house. However, if someone really prefers that we do it for them, you can send it to our office in Atlanta, office in Belgium, office in the UK, and we'll do a free calibration for you. Mostly, again, monitors are coming in with that are mostly the old monitors. And it used to be the fact that there wasn't a good way for us to do this on the old displays. They didn't have USB ports. You couldn't plug a probe directly in. You have to use standalone software. And so we understood that that was intimidating and that people preferred to send monitors in. And so we offered that for a very long time. We still offer it to this day. But Gaia Colors really changed the game for people, made things even easier. Because now your downtime was also a big consideration. Now you don't have to worry about being without a monitor for several days. Plug in a probe, an hour later, you're ready to go.

Speaker 45:48

That's really huge. I think literally just being able to hook up a probe directly to the monitor without having to have a separate system with calibration software is a major consideration alone. And the fact that you guys have custom configured it and have set everything up, it's a major feature that a lot of people don't look at. So really congratulations on spending so much time in engineering to get that so locked in. I think that is one of the key features that I love about your monitor so much. And I like that you guys are still standing behind the lifetime calibration. Sometimes it's just nice to have another pair of eyes on it.

Speaker 1 46:20

Absolutely. We're happy to do that for anybody who's ever interested in it. It's all, again, all about confidence, and we're just here to try to aid our users in having that confidence in what they're looking at.

Speaker 46:29

As we sort of get to the end of our time together, if people wanted to find out more about you and more about Flanders Scientific, where can we find out?

AutoCal Optimization And Affordable Probes

Speaker 1 46:37

So you can go to Flanderscientific.com. We have detailed information on all the monitors, all the different features that are there. We have all the tech specs. We even have a menu simulator, which is really great if you just want to get familiar with the monitor and how it works. Uh, if you want to know how to turn something on or off, you can do that. And then the other thing I would say is, you know, don't be shy about just calling us. Email us, call us, get us on live chat. Um, I think we're one of the most accessible companies in our space. You will call us and you're never more than a few minutes away from talking to somebody who does nothing but displays for a living, right? So it's not like you're calling a big uh multinational corporation who has a camera department and a router department and a and a display department. We just live and breathe displays. And so almost anybody you get on the phone here can answer your questions. And again, we have a phone tree that is basically one for support, two for sales. And that's the amount of delay you'll have before you get in touch with somebody. It's not complicated, it's not a machine. We're here to help you make the right decision and not to steer you to the most expensive solution, right? So we are here to find out what solution is going to work for your particular application, and we try to be just really blunt and honest about what we think will meet your needs.

Speaker 47:48

And I have to ask you a personal question. Out of all of the monitors that you guys sell, what is currently your favorite one?

Speaker 1 47:55

I think the new 5.51 is definitely my favorite. I just think there's so much to be said for a display that can be used as your single reference monitor. So I love the size of that display. And I still can't get over. I feel like I'm dreaming every time I look at the off-axis viewing of these things. You can literally be standing, you know, completely to the side of the display. There's virtually no color shift, there's no contrast drop. And that's something that we saw on paper before we even got the panels to evaluate. And then we started getting these things in, and we're just like, everybody just kept walking around display going, this is the weirdest thing we've ever seen because it just does not move. And again, I think that's part of why I love it is because it makes room design kind of really interesting these days. You can really do some creative things because your client doesn't have to sit in line with you. They don't have to sit in your lap anymore to see the same thing. They can really be anywhere in the room. So that one's pretty impressive. The fact that it gets so bright is also has a lot of wow factor. But yeah, that's probably my favorite right now would be that display.

Speaker 48:52

I love it. I'll check in with you in about a year to see what your next one is. Thank you so much for coming on the show and for sponsoring the podcast. I really appreciate you and everyone at FSI for being so straightforward and for keeping everybody honest.

Speaker 1 49:06

I appreciate it. Thanks, Jason.

Speaker 49:08

And for Color and Coffee, I'm Jason Bowdach. Until the next episode, happy grading, and we'll see you guys later. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, YouTube, and your podcast app of choice. Search for at Color and Coffee or at Color Coffee Podcast and join the conversation. If you're using Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please leave a review. Huge thanks to FSI, Demystify Color, and Pixel Tools for sponsoring the show. Until the next episode.