Every now and then an AV product comes along that has the power to potentially revolutionise the entertainment world. Usually we’d be talking in such instances about a consumer product; a TV, a projector, a new physical media format or the like. The latest potential game-changer to cross my radar, though, actually comes from the professional side of the AV business, in the remarkable shape of Sony’s new BVM-HX3110 pro-grade mastering monitor.
First unveiled to the professional creative industry back in April, the HX3110 is just now starting to become available to forward thinking video creatives and production studios. And having recently had the chance to look at one in action against two previous Sony mastering monitor ‘classics’, I can say that this newcomer may be about to turn both the content and hardware sides of the home entertainment landscape on their heads.
Before I get into what those changes might look like, though, it makes sense to share my experience of seeing the BVM-HX3110 running alongside Sony’s BVM-HX310 and BVM-HX300 mastering monitors – two monitors that have themselves previously been hugely popular with content creators over the past few years.
Unlike the OLED based HX300, the 30.5-inch HX3110 uses a true 4K (4096 x 2160 pixels) dual LED panel with local dimming. This is a truly premium LCD configuration (though as ever, Sony wouldn’t reveal the exact number of dimming zones it uses) where one LED ‘layer’ takes care of brightness while the other takes care of colour, introducing the potential for far better contrast and colour control than you get from a traditional single LED panel.
Sony points to five key improvements the HX3110 brings over its HX310 LCD predecessor – most if not all of which have been introduced in direct response to feedback from the video mastering world. They are: Higher brightness, faster pixel response, a new IP interface, wider viewing angle support, and improved suppression of reflections.
Of these ‘big five’ improvements, the most important one where potential impact on consumer products down the line is concerned is the HX3110’s extra brightness. Actually, just saying ‘extra brightness’ doesn’t remotely do justice to the progress Sony has made here, as rather than just finding an extra 100 nits here or 200 nits there on top of the HX3110’s 1000-nit maximum, the HX3110 increases its peak brightness to a mighty 4,000 nits (as measured on a white HDR window covering 10% of the screen).
That’s a massive four times increase over either of the other two Sony monitors, putting it on a par with Dolby’s long-running but hard to find and so relatively rarely used ‘Pulsar’ mastering monitor. A leap in brightness of this magnitude essentially feels like it’s giving creators a complete new toolbox to play with, as well as finally giving us a relatively mainstream (versus the Pulsar) professional mastering display that feels more in line with both the full capabilities of the high dynamic range video ‘format’, and the brightness capabilities of today’s premium consumer televisions.
The impact of this extra brightness was plain to see during the HX3110 demonstration in the shape of highlights that look much more intense and, actually, lifelike. Also, while brightness inevitably doesn’t hold up at 4000 nits with full-screen bright content, such content still looked significantly brighter on the HX3110 than it did on either of Sony’s previous HX series monitors.
The extra brightness has been accompanied, crucially, by some remarkably advanced light controls. For instance, I struggled to detect even a hint of backlight blooming around stand-out bright objects – even though Sony bravely showed the HX3110’s spectacularly pure and bold white details standing out against near black backdrops. At the other end of the light spectrum, the HX3110 was shown doing a better job than either of its predecessors of retaining colour saturations and nuances during very low-lit scenes.
Increasing the HX3110’s brightness to 4000 nits additionally has a massive impact on the issue of clipping. Unlike most TVs, which use dynamic tone mapping to ‘remap’ incoming HDR signals to the specific capabilities of their screens, mastering monitors tend to just ‘hard clip’ areas of a picture that might have details in them that are brighter than the peak brightness capabilities of their screens, leaving such areas looking bleached of subtle tones and shades. The HX3110’s vast leap in brightness enables it to bring out gorgeous levels of detail all the way up to 4000 nits, as evidenced both by test screens showing areas of different brightness levels, and by gorgeous 4,000 nit-rendered Gran Turismo 7 footage from Polyphony Digital, where you could see far more detail and three-dimensionality in everything from the brightest car bodywork to clouds in the sky and direct shots of the sun.
The idea that masterers will now be able to properly see the advantages of taking a fairly aggressive approach to their HDR creations could be pivotal in encouraging more of them to think a bit more boldly about how they embrace HDR’s potential.
The HX3110’s faster pixel response improvement sees it capable of delivering far cleaner, crisper looking motion than its predecessor – especially if a user takes advantage of new motion compensation technology developed in conjunction with Sony’s TV division. This combines frame creation and black frame insertion techniques to achieve what looked during the demonstration to deliver impressively crisp results largely free of unwanted side effects. Mastering purists can, of course, turn this motion processing off if they wish – and if they do judder and blur is still less noticeable than it is on the HX310.
While of pivotal importance to the professional content creation world, the way the HX3110’s new IP interface offers powerful control of the display over the internet to enable more flexible production systems and support home working will be of relatively little interest to my regular home entertainment focused readers, so I’ll move swiftly on to HX3110 enhancement four: support for wider viewing angles.
Remarkably, despite viewing angles typically being a weakness of LCD screens versus the OLED technology used in the BVM-X300, the HX3110 managed to sustain its contrast and colour performance from extreme viewing angles almost as successfully as the OLED based HX300 – and was clearly substantially better in this respect than the HX310. This will be a key point for content creators, given that they often find themselves working with multiple other creatives looking over their shoulders.
Finally, the anti-reflection filtering of the HX3110 found it suppressing light in the room much better than the HX310 and slightly better than the OLED HX300.
Add to all its picture quality goodness a built-in waveform monitor for checking the actual light levels present across every part of any image frame and really the only slight negative I could see with the HX3110 during Sony’s demonstration of its new mastering masterpiece was a tendency for otherwise profound black levels to succumb to a touch of greyness when the room lights were turned up. Since this issue doesn’t occur with the HX310 (or HX300), I imagine that the HX3110’s minor issue with ambient light is down to the changes in the structure of its panel required to deliver its wide viewing angle support and low reflectivity. Given that mastering will inevitably typically take place in a fairly or very dark environment, though, this small compromise for the HX3110 seems entirely sensible in return for all the benefits it brings.
While there are many things about the HX3110 that may well make it an indispensable tool for professional content creators, it’s that massive uplift in brightness that I come back to now as I ponder its potentially dramatic impact on both the home entertainment and theatrical worlds.
From a content creator perspective, Sony seems to be taking an ‘if we build it, they will come’ position. It certainly wasn’t particularly clear during Sony’s introduction and demonstration of the HX3110 that, unlike its other areas of improvement, the brightness part of its specification was a direct result of consultation with picture quality creatives. In fact, given the seemingly quite conservative (and theatrical projection-led) instincts of many TV show and film creators, we’re struggling to picture many big names jumping up and down ahead of its launch demanding to have the sort of brightness flexibility the HX3110 offers.
If you actually have a 4000-nit monitor you can put in front of creatives, though (especially one from a brand with as much presence in the professional display world as Sony), you can simply show them the impact luminance can have in terms of dynamism, impact, peak light details, colour volumes and so on. All the key tools that directors, DPs and colorists use for creating moods and visually enhancing their narratives. The fact that the HX3110 proves you can also show creatives that this expansion of their creative toolkit can be achieved without compromising black levels may really start to turn heads.
The process of winning over creative hearts and minds will likely go quicker and easier if Sony can manage to persuade a few influential, respected directors and DPs (Zack Snyder, for instance, already seems to have an understanding of how important brightness is to HDR movie making) to start mastering to something close to the HX3110’s maximum capabilities.
With many directors only currently using a fraction of what even 1000-nit mastering monitors can achieve, though (in fact, many still seem to be working in an SDR first environment, rather than the HDR first world a monitor like the HX3110 pretty much demands), and with 4000 nit considerations likely requiring a rethinking of shooting techniques as well as post mastering, Sony admits that changing filmmaker minds as far as they need to change to start embracing 4000 nits will be a process rather than an overnight switch. For TV-buying consumers, though, the arrival of the HX3110 could have much faster ramifications.
In fact, part of Sony’s motivation with the HX3110 is that there is already clearly a demand for much brighter content on the TV side of the home entertainment equation, where brightness has long pushed way ahead of the luminance restrictions associated with all non-Pulsar mastering monitors.
We’ve been able to buy televisions for years now that can deliver brightness levels of 2,000 nits and more – well beyond the 1000 nits of Sony’s previous two BVM mastering monitors. In fact, in what now looks like a prophetic hint of what was to come, Sony’s own debut 8K TVs, the Z9Gs, managed to hit 4000 nits as far back as 2019.
Admittedly such ultra-bright TVs have typically only existed at the most premium end of the TV world. But then AV fans have always understood that the closer TVs are able to get to the all-round performance of a $25,000 and more professional mastering monitor, the more expensive that TV is going to be. Also, this year has seen Hisense and, especially, TCL start to push nit levels well beyond 1000 nits even on pretty affordable sets.
With all this market for brightness at the consumer display end of its business, it makes sense for Sony, given its unique involvement with all stages of the production chain (from the Sony Pictures movie studio to its own cinema-grade digital cameras, its range of mastering monitors, its own high bandwidth/high quality Bravia Core streaming services and its own projectors and TVs), to create a consistent eco-system that’s consistent. A system where what goes in (at the filming and mastering stages) should be able to also come out (albeit with some inevitable price-based compromises) in your living room.
Indeed, numerous TV brands have a long history of using mastering monitors as the performance ‘targets’ for their premium TVs, even going so far as to run demonstrations of their high-end TVs alongside mastering monitors (more often than not the Sony BVM-HX300).
It’s this relationship between TVs, mastering monitors and the whole ‘staying true to director intent’ narrative some TV brands thrive on that makes the HX3110 so potentially game-changing for the TV world.
For years now, many high-end TV/home cinema fans have turned to OLED for picture quality that most aligns with their desire to watch films and TV shows looking as close as possible to how their creators designed them to look. Partly because of their pixel-level light controls, but also because the 1000 nits or so brightness (which has gone up to around 1400 nits with the latest Micro Lens Array and Quantum Dot OLED displays) OLED TVs can achieve has tallied quite nicely with the nit levels achieved by the most popular mastering monitors.
The HX3110 changes all that in an instant. There’s simply no way that any OLED technology we’ve heard of is even close to achieving the 4000 nit peak brightness the HX3110 can handle. The only TVs that actually can get close to 4000 nits, or even hit it in full in one or two cases, are LCD models. Specifically LED or Mini LED models with local dimming. TVs that uses much of the same tech, in other words, as the HX3110.
So are we about to see the premium TV power base suddenly swing away from OLED to LCD? I actually think it’s possible – but only if TV manufacturers can up their LCD TV game enough.
After all, a TV’s performance isn’t solely a function of how bright it is. Other factors such as black levels, backlight clouding/blooming, colour saturations, colour banding, motion clarity, sharpness and so on all also play their part, and problems in any one of these areas can cause you to lose your connection with and immersion in what you’re watching. In fact, the brighter an LCD TV is, the more difficult it can be to control some of those other factors effectively.
Some TV makers, at least, appear to be up for the challenge. Sony had a 4000-nit TV a few years ago, as already noted, and consistently prioritises brightness on its more mainstream LCD TVs too. And I’ll never forget the jaw-dropping 10,000-nit concept display Sony showed at the CES way back in 2018.
Hisense has just recently suggested that it will soon be showing a 10,000-nit LED TV, TCL’s X955 Mini LED TVs claim to be capable of 5000 nits, and Samsung fairly routinely hits 2000-3000 nits with its premiumMini LED TVs.
All of the really bright LCD TVs so far have come with some sort of strings attached, of course – such as backlight blooming or dimming of small bright areas to avoid blooming. But LED technology is improving year on year, and this process could well accelerate if more content emerges that make LED’s brightness advantage more imperative. And if the whole brightness ‘project’ isn’t ultimately blocked by overly-aggressive power consumption regulations.
In any case, if the choice becomes tolerating one or two unwanted side effects but getting the full range of creative HDR brightness intent on the one hand, and potentially sacrificing 2,500-3000 nits of brightness and potentially lots of peak brightness detailing for the otherwise more immersive balance of an OLED on the other, the buying decision for serious enthusiasts will surely become much more complicated.
It will also be fascinating, finally, to see how TV brands respond the potentially game-changing impact of the HX3110. Will traditionally OLED-focused brands like LG and Panasonic start pivoting to LCD? Will LCD TVs become the premium models in brands’ ranges with OLED becoming the mid-range or even budget options? Will there be a rush to find some way of getting thousands of nits more out of OLED screens without opening them up to horrific amounts of screen burn? Only time will tell.
Given, though, that Sony has just given the professional end of the AV world the HX3110 and has also made great store in recent years of being relatively neutral about which TV technology it ‘supports’, choosing to cover all bases, it will certainly be very interesting indeed to see how the brand’s 2024 TV range shapes up.
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