Hi everyone,

We are happy to announce that our recommended SmallHD First Time Order for Tier 1 repair centers is now available. You may have noticed this in development on the price list but we feel we now have a refined list that will give you all a good starting stock of parts for common repairs. These are primarily mainboards, panels, housings, and SDI/BNC connectors for some of our most popular monitors at Tier 1. For your convenience we've attached a PDF, but you can view this on the price list as well and keep up with any price changes.

As a reminder, we want all Tier 1 repair centers to keep parts in stock so repairs can be performed quickly, without needing to wait for parts to ship from the United States. Our hope is that you can reach a point where you're only needing to order parts once or twice a month, which will reduce your overall shipping costs. Additionally, this First Time Order will help make sure you have parts on hand in the face of potential parts shortages. We have worked hard to mitigate the effects of the global chip shortage, but have seen instances where some parts have been delayed by several weeks or longer while we wait for components to become available, often at higher costs than we've seen in the past.

Some of you have already been placing orders for parts that meet or exceed quantities listed on this sheet. Please review your recent orders and what parts you have in stock. We realize this is a substantial financial commitment; the total recommended order comes in at just under US$13,000. If necessary we can break this up over several orders, but we would like to see everyone ordering these supplies within the next 2 months.
On a related topic, please be sure to refresh the Price List page in ScreenSteps if you keep it open. We're making regular updates and most Tier 1 monitors are now in the price list except for a few FOCUS variants. The price list should be completed early next week, other than regular updates. For our users in China and other areas where Google products are difficult to access, as a short-term workaround we will send you Excel spreadsheet files next week when the list is complete. Our longer-term solution will have Harvinder's team displaying the data in the Portal, without actually embedding any pages from Google. This will make sure you're kept up-to-date on any changes.

As one final note, all US offices for Creative Solutions will be closed on Friday, April 15th. We'll resume normal operations on Monday. We hope everyone has an enjoyable weekend!

Best regards,

Jeff Jacobson

Hi everyone,

We had a few things we wanted to let you know about. First, one of the features of the recent update to the CRC Portal was email notifications for Portal activities, such as a message on a repair or approval of a claim. We have found these messages may be going to your spam or junk mail folder. We are working on resolving this issue, but please be aware to check there for any messages from the system.

Speaking of approvals and messages, I started approving SmallHD claims in the Portal this week. However, we discovered that I can't send chat messages inside the Portal, although I have seen that some of you are able to. Harvinder and his team are preparing for another software update on Monday, and it should include a fix for that issue. You will likely see more activity next week. Harvinder will have more information for you about other changes coming in that update. Please be prepared for the Portal to be down for a short period on Monday.

We've had some situations where customers have a product under warranty but we've listed the needed part as being no longer available. If you have a customer in this situation please contact us. The part is no longer available for order, but we may still have some. These are in such low quantities that we don't want to risk them being damaged in shipping, but it may be possible to send the product to our headquarters for repair. It may take longer for the repair, but we waste everyone's time and money if we ship a part that arrives unusable.

Some of you have had questions about adding parts to repairs, particularly when you don't see a part listed for a product. You might see this when using a fully prepped panel on a SmallHD monitor repair, for example. The list of parts you see comes directly from the Bill of Materials used by our assembly teams to build products. SmallHD has created some repair-specific parts for reasons such as speeding up repairs or combining several parts that are safer to ship assembled, but these are not used when building a product from scratch. We are working on a way to have these show up for you, but for now you can use our Add Other Parts section at the bottom of the screen:

Click the button that says "+ Add Parts that you don't see in the list above" and enter the part you need, such as ASM-703U-LCD-FP-C.

Finally, for those of you who expressed an interest in Tier S please be assured that we have not forgotten about you. We are working hard internally to resolve problems this transition has uncovered and try to prevent them from happening again when we launch Tier S. As we get closer to launching Tier S we will contact those of you who expressed interest to schedule a second round of interviews and provide you with additional information such as expected costs.

Thank you for your patience and support as we continue with this transition!

Best regards,

Jeff Jacobson

Hey everyone,

We wanted to give you a quick update about warranty claims. As part of the new update Harvinder's team made to the Portal we will now start processing credits for warranty claims. The SmallHD accounting department recently noticed that a few repair centers from the old program have large balances of credits that have never been used. Please make sure your company's accounting department is aware of the credits generated from your warranty repairs and is actually using them! One of the changes we're making in this Portal update is that email notifications will now be generated by the portal. Our accounting team is also working on changes in their bookkeeping software to directly update your accounting contact with information about available balances, although we don't have a timeline for when this will start working. This week I will be sending some emails directly to certain companies our Accounting Department has identified with large unused credits.

Also, please remember to record all repairs, warranty and non-warranty, in the portal. This will help improve our records for parts usage, which is important for planning and making sure we get a sufficient stock of parts from our suppliers. Given the ongoing chip and component shortages, the Creative Solutions purchasing team is working hard to make sure we are keeping adequate supplies in stock and prioritizing where limited components are used.

Thank you for your patience during this roll-out!

Best regards,

Jeff Jacobson

Hey everyone,

We wanted to send a quick reminder about contact points. Please be sure to use our group emails as much as possible when contacting us.

For orders or parts quotes, email crcorders@cs.inc
For credits, portal help, repair help, or all other questions, email crcsupport@cs.inc

By emailing the group addresses more people will see your message and you can get a faster response. This will be important as I will not be working for the remainder of this week as I return home from Canada. We have also been seeing a lot of direct emails about logins and passwords for the portal. By emailing crcsupport@cs.inc Harvinder and his team will see your message right away and can work with you faster.

For those of you whose companies have signed new contracts, we have sent a spreadsheet requesting usernames and email addresses. Most have been returned and we have sent login emails to those we have received. Alternatively, if you have not sent an email for login accounts, you can register new users directly.

• Go to http://repairs.cs.inc. It will redirect to CS-ID login.
• Use the Sign-up option.
• Enter the details required (Username, Email, Password) and complete sign-up.
• you will see “access denied”, which is fine.
• Now send us the username/email to authorise your access for http://repairs.cs.inc.

If you've already sent us account information, your account might already be authorized and you might be able to login. If it has not yet been authorized you will need to wait for Harvinder and his team to authorize the login to the correct account. Please allow 3 business days for this to happen.

A few updates for those of you who have already logged in:

• Non-warranty repairs no longer require warranty documentation
• Some SmallHD and Teradek products are not configured correctly in the system. We are hoping to have this tested and resolved by Friday.
• Uploading large files for proof of purchase does not appear to be working. For now, please try to keep those file sizes under 3 MB.

We appreciate all your patience during this transition and are excited that normal operations are starting to move again!

Best regards,

Jeff Jacobson

Hey everyone,

We're excited to announce that the new CRC Portal is now live! The new address is:

https://repairs.cs.inc/

Please note that your old logins will not work at the new portal. The new portal does not use Google; instead it uses a new login we're calling CS-ID. This login is planned to eventually be used in other Creative Solutions services. We have requested user email addresses from many of the companies that have already signed contracts. Some of those may have already received an email with a username and initial password. This email has the subject of "Welcome to Creative Solutions Apps (CS-ID)". The first time you login with this password you will be prompted to change it. Please do not share accounts or passwords with others. If you have signed a contract but not received this email we expect to be sending them to you this week or will be requesting your list of users.

Using the new portal will feel very familiar to you, compared to the old system, but we have a Quick Start Guide for you here:

https://repairs.cs.inc/help/quick-start.html

At this time we do not have standalone claims enabled. If you have a new part on a repair that does not work, please list it on the repair along with the part you used that did work (so you will have two of the same part on the claim). We hope to have standalone claims enabled soon.

As a reminder, we want all repairs (warranty and non-warranty) recorded in the portal. This will help us track repair trends and better forecast parts usage, as well as make sure a complete repair history for any product is available.

Best regards,

Jeff Jacobson

Hey everyone,

We wanted to provide everyone with some quick updates.

First, the ability to start new repairs in the old SmallHD Portal is being turned off this week. Current repairs in the system can still be updated. The new Creative Solutions Portal should be launching next week. For those of you continuing into the new system your repair history will be transferred. The new Creative Solutions Portal will have a different web address, so you will still be able to access the SmallHD Portal for historical data. Those of you who have already signed contracts should have received an email requesting information about the users you would like to add to the new system.

Second, we want to let you know that our US offices will be closed on Monday, January 17th in observance of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday.

Additionally, I will be out of the office for the remainder of this week while traveling to Canada to assist my wife's family with some medical issues. I will be working remotely for a few weeks starting next week. While I'm traveling this week please be sure to contact crcsupport@cs.inc with any questions you may have. The other brand managers as well as Marshall will do their best to assist you.

Best regards,

Jeff Jacobson

Hello everyone,

We want to let you know that we will be closing the current CRC Portal soon in preparation to launch the new version of the portal supporting Teradek, Wooden Camera, and SmallHD. All current claims in the portal have been reviewed dating back to January 1st of this year. All claims have been approved or rejected, or some claims are still open with questions on them that we are waiting for a response. Please review your claims and respond to any questions as soon as possible. We anticipate transitioning the current Portal into a read-only state after this weekend.

At this time we hope everyone has completed all repairs you may have accepted. As a reminder, all contracts were terminated effective October 31st of this year. We anticipate new contracts starting to send out this week to those who have already interviewed. If you have not yet applied to be in the new program but are interested in continuing please contact crcsupport@cs.inc as soon as possible.

Best regards,

Jeff Jacobson

Hey everyone!

Our software team has released firmware version 4.6.7. There are 2 main additions in this version. First, it supports the Cine 13 which we are starting to build. Second, it helps resolve some color issues on the Indie 7. These monitors have not been shipping with any factory calibration LUT, not even a population LUT. However, not having a LUT at all is not behaving as expected. This firmware now adds a simple LUT that makes no changes to the image, but this still results in the panels having less of a pink color to them. This has been added to the Firmware Archive folder on the Certified Repair Drive.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13iXKDRpDw1uLRN9b7UVZ8bhmFaLF6wOe?usp=sharing

We've also launched a public beta for firmware 4.7.0, which fixes a lot of bugs. If you're interested you can download it from our public Downloads page:

https://downloads.smallhd.com/

There are some significant problems with this release currently, so this should not be used on customer monitors without clearly explaining the problems to them. The biggest issue is that with most on-camera monitors this firmware will clip green colors when using a YCC video signal. It also will not output UHD 30fps signals over HDMI on Smart 7 monitors unless a LUT is on the output page. These will be fixed before this firmware version sees an official release.

If you use the beta yourself or a customer uses it, please send an email to support@smallhd.com with your results. If you find a problem we want to know, and even if you have no problems we also want to hear that.

One final note: our US offices will be closed from Friday, July 2nd, through Monday, July 5th, for the Independence Day holiday. Please be aware there may be some delayed responses for any messages sent to us during that time.

Best regards,
Jeff Jacobson

Hi everyone,

We've had a few firmware updates since I've started the job that I wanted to make sure you're aware of. The latest version is now 4.6.6, but we've also had releases for versions 4.6.4 and 4.6.5.

4.6.4

This version adds support for a new LCD144 panel on the Cine 7 (including wireless variants) and prevents downgrading the firmware to earlier versions that do not support this panel. Last week I updated the genesis-test files in Google Drive to this version. In the shared drive under "CRC - Firmware / Genesis Files / Boot" > "Genesis Files" you'll see folders for every monitor type. Inside those folders you'll see an older genesis file (which I don't know the exact version of) and a folder labeled 4.6.4. Inside that folder is the appropriate genesis file. Here's a direct link to that folder:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VCqc4sV8DqlQuq3iZSPqrYXePs_xW4Nk

4.6.5

This version fixes a bug that could cause problems when updating the firmware on a Bolt 4K Wireless module while connected to a Cine 7. Previously problems during the firmware update could somewhat brick the units and require them to be connected to a computer running Bolt Manager with an uncommon USB cable (USB A male to USB Micro B female). This update should resolve that issue.

4.6.6

This version adds support for an alternate accelerometer that may ship on some mainboards, primarily the Smart 7 mainboards.

The smallhd5 files for all of these firmware versions have been uploaded to Drive in the Firmware Archive folder.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vzGNSDC3qjPM8XXx4GuhrjYG-wMjTPLP

As a reminder you can also download firmware update files along with customer-facing update information from the public Downloads page:

https://downloads.smallhd.com/

I hope you have a great weekend!

Best regards,

Jeff Jacobson

Hey everyone,

I'm happy to introduce myself as the new CRC Program Manager for SmallHD, taking over the role Tim Cheek held previously. We're making a lot of changes here and have big plans for the future of the program. For one thing, we've split the duties Tim used to manage. I will be focused solely on the CRC program, while a still to-be-hired person will run our local repair department. With me focusing just on the CRC program, we're looking to have better support for you, such as faster approvals on warranty repairs and better documentation to make your job easier.

Some of you may recognize my name, but for those who don't know me I've been with SmallHD in Technical and Customer Support since 2018. My background is in broadcast television, starting on the production side of things in 2007. I think this experience will help us all and I am excited to continue to work with everyone in this new role.

One thing to highlight that I'll be focusing on immediately is getting claims approved more quickly. As part of this, though, we'll also be giving claims more scrutiny for approval. We want to make sure everyone is on the same page for how the system works. To help speed up approvals, here are some things I've already been informed are issues and am seeing as I start working on the system:

• Warranty claims must fall within the definitions of "warranty" as defined on our website and in our contract. Anything that is not within these definitions will not be approved. If you need help reviewing this information please let me know. For example, user damage is never a warranty issue.
• Always make detailed notes and reasons for additional requests, such as additional labor. This will help with the approval process; unexplained requests may be declined.
• Monitor repairs must be done as a monitor repair, not using the standalone claim. If you use a standalone claim for a monitor you will not be reimbursed for labor. Standalone claims must have detailed notes for explanation or the claim will be denied.
• We would like to see repairs entered for both warranty and non-warranty repairs. For non-warranty repairs you will still bill the customer, but we would like to have complete records of a monitor's repair history.
• If you are unsure of anything, please reach out and ask. Including pictures and/or videos can help us get you to a resolution quickly.
• If you need training for how to use the CRC system to do repairs, we have created new training materials. A written guide is available here or as a PDF in our Google Drive under the folder CRC Repair Log / Warranty Claim Portal Training Videos. A new video walkthrough is also available in that same folder.

For now, particularly as I'm transitioning from my Support job to CRC Program Manager, most things will remain the same. Please utilize these email contacts:

• Orders to CRCOrders@cs.inc
• CRC portal issues to crcsupport@smallhd.com
• Credit/payment issues to AR@smallhd.com
• Troubleshooting & Repair (how-to) questions to repairteam@smallhd.com

Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions. I look forward to working with you!

Best regards,

Jeff Jacobson

Hi everyone,

We have some important updates on Smart 7 monitor mainboards. New revisions of these boards are coming in and there are changes to panel compatibility and wireless compatibility. There are more updates for compatibility with parts required and some jigs, but we don't have all of that information available yet. I didn't want to wait any longer to tell you about the mainboards, though, because you will need to update your pricing.

The Indie 7 and 702 Touch are now using mainboard POP-20061-240. The Cine 7 is now using mainboard POP-20061-330 (there was a POP-20061-323 used in assembly for a week or two, so you might see this revision during a repair, but it was quickly replaced with the -330 board and never available for order). A change affecting all of these boards is the connection to the panel is now a different cable. Previously the mainboards connected to the panels using PRT-64029-xxx. We provided the fully prepped panels with this flex cable already folded and attached to the panels. Starting with mainboard revisions -240 and -323, the connection now uses PRT-64012-001. You will need to remove the PRT-64029-xxx and replace it with PRT-64012-001.

These flex cables need specific folds to fit in the monitors. We use jigs here to make those folds precisely. At this time I don't know if we will be able to send these cables pre-folded from our factory or if you will need to purchase the jigs and perform the folds at the time of repair. I was hoping to have this information for you already but we will have to send another email and update Screensteps. Be sure to look at the embedded price sheet, where these changes will also be noted. The new boards and cables are already listed there. For now, replacement panels will continue to come with PRT-64029-002 attached. This may change to PRT-64012-001 being attached or no cable attached at all. Again, we hope to have answers for you soon.

One other important note is specifically for the Cine 7 Bolt 500 RX, Sidekick RX, and 500 TX. The new -323 and -330 revision mainboards are NOT compatible with the internal wireless boards. If you have a revision -102 or earlier board in stock we recommend keeping one or two set aside for use with the wireless monitors. My hope is we can get a small batch built to continue supporting the wireless monitors, but we will have to look at how many have been needed historically and what the costs will be. The wireless boards need a chip that cost $3 when the Cine 7 launched in 2019 but that chip has cost more than $200 in recent months, which prompted our design change.

Please keep an eye out for future emails and check ScreenSteps for updates. We hope to have more answers on the cables for you soon.

Best regards,

Jeff Jacobson