New on set / grade monitor? SmallHD or Atomos? Or something else?

[Eirik Heim]

Hi,
I am a cinematographer based in Northern Norway. I am looking into acquiring a bigger monitor for on set use and as a grade monitor at my office. I have an older 25 OLED reference monitor from Sony that is about 4 years old. I did a lot of grading before, but seldom anymore. Mostly for my cinematography work, LUTs and for checking out my footage.

I have been looking at both SmallHD and Atomos. Will the Sumo 19 do a sufficient job? It is mostly to have a bigger than 7" inch screen available on set and there are no rental houses around here. Since I do not grade anymore, I was thinking of selling the OLED and just what I buy now for the small amount of grading I will do in the future.

[Ben Scott]

The Sumo is awful. Picture terrible and the touchscreen on mine died inside a week meaning I could not adjust anything. 

 

 

[Adam Froehlich]

Not a fan of the Sumo either.  Very unstable, it crashes often and can't be relied on as a mission-critical recorder.  Within a year, a section of the backlight LEDs had died, leaving a portion of the screen darkened.  And I've had a lot of difficulty using their built in color space/gamma transforms, in addition to some wackiness with custom LUTs.

Wasn't a fan of the picture either.  It now always gets relegated to the script sup, or some other use that isn't image-critical.  Hey, but at least it's bright...

 

Atomos and SmallHD aren't very popular in the color community either, I don't think they can be trusted for color accuracy.   I take my Flanders (BM240) between set and my color suite often, I find it works well.  The drawbacks (in my opinion) are just low brightness (fine for studio work, but kind of unusable outdoors), and latency (might be difficult to pull fast focus, or distracting for directors if a/v isn't synced)