Hi guys(and girls) I am about to buy an external monitor for my xlh1 and have narrowed it to 2 choices-the marshall hdsdi 7 inch or the panasonic btlh80 7.9 inch. Both look pretty good with the Panny being more expensive but bigger with a couple more features. My needs are for critical focus, framing, colour and use in the field to review footage. Any comments would be apreciated as I'm putting in an order tonite at BH.

I would say you're probably better off going with the panasonic. Unless you want to buy my marshall. I would love to have a built in waveform monitor, I guess I would want a vectroscope as well, but the question really comes down to how much do you want to spend. I've gotten really good results with the marshall, it makes clients and directors happy. I use it in conjunction with my fu-1000 and haven't had any issues with the overall results. It seems to me (and this may be the same with the panasonic) that it is stretched a little wider then it should be. But it does have blue only and is very easy to mount on a 1/4-20 thread.

The marshall's are I think 2000 bucks with the nebtek adaptation, which is kinda surprising. Where the panasonics are 2200 but you have to plunk another 700 down for an hd-sdi board. Which makes it about %50 more expensive. It seems to me that if you have the 3k to throw down for the marshall that's the better investment, but I can speak from experience that the marshall is pretty good to...

Glenn,

We have the Panasonic BT-LH900. It's a set up...but I feel you won't be buying a new monitor for many, many years to come.

HDSDI, Component and composite inputs....plus switchable HDSDI inputs...
Waveform and remote control...

We love ours....and use it daily. Just remember...I feel if you use it every day...the extra money is easily spent....AND it 's easy to amortize it.

Just my 2 cents. Plus...we had a bad experience with a Marshall monitor....