HDMI Field Monitor Review

by Sebastian WöberFebruary 25^th, 2010

Controls Marshall V-LCD…

The Marshall monitor with the difficult name was the easiest to use. It has 4 seperate buttons for the different inputs. It has user customizable function buttons (F1, F2, F3, F4) and the brightness, contrast, saturation and tint adjustments are done via knobs. Those knobs are only digital triggers too, they take as long to adjust as buttons would.

There are some good features on the Marshall monitor like blue only, a pixel to pixel mode that makes the picture a little bigger in sd mode but I found was quite useless in hdmi mode. There is also a nice feature called “false color” which let’s you check exposure via a color chart or a peaking filter which I found hard to use.
Navigation was really quick but unfortunately there is no way to scale the picture.

There is a switch on the side to set battery or dc input. It happened often that I accidentally turned the unit off because the is so extremely easy to switch.

Most noticeable at this point is that the image is displayed smaller than on the V8000 that features 480p as well. Probably this monitor is underscanning while the V8000 is overscanning, but the feature cannot be turned off. Or maybe it simply cannot display a 16:9 image. We’re losing a bit of screen size and resolution this way.

Opinion:
I think the menu is hard to read, it’s white on light grey. Had to adjust the images in photoshop to make it readable here. the battery/dc switch is very very easy to mistakenly press.

Controls ikan V5600
Like on the V8000 the controls of the V5600 are on the front. There are 3 clearly mrked buttons with a single function and 4 more for menu, directions and an on/off button.

This device is very easy to use and navigation is very quick.
It has the same functionality as the V8000 with the difference that you cannot change the aspect ration on this one during hdmi mode.
The left and right buttons will flip the image in all four directions. The menu button gives you access to brightness, contrast, saturation, langage and blue/red/green color values. There is no blue only as on professional broadcast monitors for calibration with a standard color chart.

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