Convergent Design Odyssey 7Q+: What It Is and Who It’s For

From the HD Pro Guide Magazine archive: this review first appeared in HD Pro Guide Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2015). By Jon Firestone.

Convergent Design has always been known for professional recorders, but its Odyssey series does much more: besides being versatile recorders, they are full-featured monitors. The Odyssey 7Q+, the newest model at the time, added 4K recording over HDMI, a feature many Sony A7S and Panasonic GH4 owners had been waiting for.

As a recorder

The recording side is very versatile. I use mine mainly as a 4K ProRes recorder for my Sony A7S. It can also be upgraded in software to record raw from several cameras, including the Sony FS700, FS7 and F55, the ARRI Alexa and the Canon C500. The Canon and ARRI licenses could be rented for $99 a day or bought outright for $1,495 and $1,995, considerably less than Codex or Sony raw recording options. I like being able to rent the license by the day, so I can take the occasional ARRI raw job without committing to the full price.

I also use the Odyssey for playback in the field, like a VTR, when I don’t want to tie up the camera. Its touchscreen scrub function makes playback much friendlier, and you can add markers.

Many cameras benefit from an external recorder that captures raw or uses a better codec than the camera’s internal one. Onboard media works for many projects, but I use the 7Q+ when there will be heavy color correction or chroma keying, or when I need the absolute most from the camera. The Sony FS700, FS7 and F55 can send raw data to it. The Sony A7S has a 4K sensor and incredible low-light sensitivity but records only 1080p internally; it can, however, send a clean UHD 4K image over HDMI, which the 7Q+ records as UHD ProRes. The Odyssey also has timecode in and out and embeds timecode in its files.

As a monitor

The Odyssey was designed to be similar in size and price to other 7-inch OLED monitors, but it adds two SSD bays for recording and a touchscreen. OLEDs are my favorite monitors: incredible contrast, deep blacks, wide viewing angles and the most accurate color available. Their drawbacks are price and brightness compared with newer high-bright LCDs, so you’ll need a hood in bright sunlight.

The 7Q+ is factory calibrated and very accurate. Monitors are usually rated by how much of the Rec. 709 color space they can display; this one covers all of Rec. 709 and even DCI-P3, putting it on par with the monitors most colorists use.

LUT support

LUTs (lookup tables, also called looks) apply a color transform to an image for artistic or technical reasons. Shooting in a log profile captures the most color and dynamic range, but the image looks washed out and flat. A LUT makes it look normal again. High-end cameras can do this internally, but most can’t, so log footage won’t look its best on set. That’s not great for clients or for making lighting decisions, and while your colorist may love you, it’s hard on everyone else.

The 7Q+ supports LUTs, including camera-specific ones, so a Sony S-Log feed can be converted to standard Rec. 709 on screen while you still record S-Log. It also passes the LUT downstream, so other monitors looped through it show the corrected image too, which matters because very few monitors have LUT support of their own. Convergent Design also planned support for importing custom LUTs.

Focus and exposure tools

Image quality is important, but a production monitor also needs tools to check exposure and focus.

• Focus: Edge+Video is a form of peaking that highlights in-focus detail in red, green or blue. An edge-only mode shows a mostly black image with sharp details in white. My favorite, Edge Enhanced, shows a dark grayscale image with pronounced edges. There’s also 1:1 zoom (each source pixel shown as one monitor pixel; with a 1280×800 panel and a 1920×1080 signal that’s roughly 2x magnification) and a 2:1 zoom, and you can drag the magnified area around with the touchscreen.
• Exposure: a customizable false color mode with an on-screen key showing each color’s IRE range, adjustable zebras, and a responsive waveform and histogram that can be full screen or windowed, plus customizable guides.
• Silent operation: the monitor has no fans, unlike some recorders, which helps when it’s mounted on camera near the mic for close-ups.

The 7Q+ also cross-converts HDMI to SDI and back, and can down-convert 4K to 1080p. With my A7S, I feed 4K HDMI into the 7Q+ and run 1080p SDI out to my other field monitors. Both SDI and HDMI have loop-through.

Models and what was next

• Odyssey 7Q+: the most advanced recorder, about $2,295 at launch, including two 256GB SSDs.
• Odyssey 7Q: about $1,695, with the same features minus 4K recording over HDMI, and no SSDs included.
• Odyssey 7: about $1,295, with the same monitoring tools but fewer recording options and inputs.

Both the 7Q+ and 7Q have four SDI inputs, and Convergent Design planned upgrades to record multiple streams at once.

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