The HD Monitor Quagmire

I am throughly confused about the HD monitor solutions out there. Basically I'm upgrading my FCP BetaSp edit suite to do HD. I've been shooting HD on HDCam and DVCPro HD for a few years now but now I have the opportunity to edit a pilot for Discovery. I own an uncompressed SD FCP system based on a blackmagic card and a BetaSP deck. Now I need to take the plunge and edit in HD so I'm off to the store.

The one purchase that has me scratching my head over is the HD monitor question. I own a sony BVM-D9H5 9" HD CRT Field Monitor and that works great but I need a bigger edit monitor. A lot of people talk about the new Panasonic 2600W as a good solution. Others say go with a Panasonic Plasma due to the higher contrast ratio and ability to display better blacks. Others say only CRTs are capable of displaying the true HD colorspace and they argue that only 50" plus plasmas are true 1920x1080 - that most LCD/Plasma screens are around 1,024x768 resolution and scale the incoming signal - literally throwing away the excess pixels.

Basically I'm looking for a 20" grading monitor. Something I could edit and color correct a show with and hand DiscoveryHD an HDCam master and know they're seeing the same thing I did in my edit bay. Oh yeah, it would be nice if I didn't have to spend $11,500 for a Sony BVM-F24E too.

Thanks for the help guys.

Tim Gibbons

Wow Nick, that's a great idea. It's under $2k even. I noticed it sells without any inputs at all though. Here's a link to the 19":

http://www.jvc.ca/jvcpro/product-detail.aspx?h=archive&l=E&model=DT-V1900CG...

I own a JVC SD 20" and it's been working like a champ for years now.It's my main monitor in my edit suite.

Thanks.

Tim