Adorama Flashpoint 7-inch LCD Monitor

Underscan/Overscan and PiP

The other function in the menu that’s worth discussing is the underscan function. When you turn off underscan it allows you to view the full raster. Underscan and overscan are holdouts from the old NTSC days where on CRT TV monitors, you wouldn’t always see the entire raster of the 720x480 image because the bezel itself would crop out some of the image. So that’s the primary reason why in the olden days you had action safe and title safe, and then you’d see an area outside of that. On this monitor here it’s not as big of a difference between over- and underscan, but you definitely want to turn that to on so that you’re able to see the full raster of the image and make sure that those straight boompoles don’t slide into the top of your image, or that there isn’t something distracting on the side, when you go to do your edit. When you edit and deliver this video to the web, the full raster is always viewable, so you want to make sure that you’re monitoring the full raster and not an underscan unless you have reason to do otherwise.

In the menu system there’s also a PiP function, which stands for picture in picture. So in addition to the HDMI input, which would be the large portion of the screen, you can also have a picture-in-picture inset in one of the corners that would show you an additional second input. This is really great when you have a two-camera shoot and you want to see what the other cameraperson is capturing. This comes into the monitor via an RCA input.

Color Output

The last thing I want to talk about in this review of the Adorama 7-inch LCD monitor is the color as it comes out of the box. And to test this I compared the color off of the FS700’s LCD screen--which I know to be fairly true color-wise--to my Marshall 7-inch monitor, which is my go-to monitor and the one that I’ve been using in my business for over a year now. I know the Marshall delivers great color, especially when I set it to the proper 6500K (Kelvin) that broadcast monitors should be set to in this viewing environment.

When I compared it to the Adorama Flashpoint 7-inch, the Adorama had a different color temperature. I went to the user menu and I set it to 6500K, and it still didn’t look right. There are further refinements I can do. There are RGB values up to 128 that I can set for all three. I didn’t bother to do that to try to get it to look the same. Color matching, especially on monitors, is not my forte, and I kind of wished it did come out of the box calibrated as nicely as the FS700’s LCD screen or my Marshall monitor were, but it wasn’t.

So if correct color out of the box is really critical for you, then you should know that the Adorama Flashpoint didn’t have the best color in its factory settings. But when I’m viewing charts and things like that, it seems to be able to represent all the colors fairly well. It’s just that default value wasn’t where I’d like for it to be.