Bit of a Con Really - Follow-up ...

I would agree. The ability of most consumers to do more than make a mess is very unlikely. Even someone like myself, having calibrated displays for 30 years, can't do much to align a color management system without a GOOD meter. I can get gray scale improved, but not really accurate.

Most sets now have RGB gains and cuts for gray scale in the user menu. Some have far more available.

Leonard

Look at the early shows of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They were lit and photgraphed as if they were films. There are many scenes where there is action in the shadows.

You would have seen what was happening if you were watching it on film, on TV it was just a grayish blur.

If I remember correctly, they were shot on film.

Geoff.

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You will be pleased to hear that my Pioneer is set to PURE, with all the controls at their default settings (except for a bit of Sharpness goosing). The image is just plain gaw-juss.

I considered having a $350 calibration performed, but decided that I wasn't going to pay that much for a technician who knows even less about colorimetry than I to perform. The Pioneers are supposedly nearly correct out of the box.

If you want a demo disk, get the Blu-ray of "The Searchers". I don't care for the movie, but the VistaVision photography is jaw-dropping. "Amadeus" and "2001" are almost as good. With the best material, you sometimes think you're looking through a sheet of glass at the thing itself.

camera

I don't understand what you're talking about. "Barney Miller" was videotape, "ST TNG" was film.

Regardless of whether tape or film is used, the cinematographer is likely to light the scenes according to what the thinks the average TV is able to reproduce.

Does anyone make cheap-but-good instrumentation? I could justify a $500 investment.

(I can hear you laughing now.)

That was my point. They lit (and photographed it) as if it were going to be shown in theaters and not on TV.

Geoff.

Perhaps standards are higher in the UK, then.

There are lots of calibration techs out there that know little more than how to point a probe at the set and adjust gray scale. There are a few dozen, perhaps, that really understand what it takes to make an accurate display. I suggest you look at the list at ISF Forum. The couple of hundred members who subscribe there are among the best in the world, and all but a handful of the elite calibration pros are found there.

Leonard

Your memory is incorrect, in this case.

Leonard

The cheapest I would even consider for most current displays is the i1 Pro. None of the tristimulus colorimeters will be able to measure the narrow spectrum of many modern displays, nor likely match the filters in wider spectrum lighted systems. Even the i1 pro is marginal for the LED and Laser sets, from what I understand. Better meters will be many thousands of dollars.

The best pricing that you will find is packaged with the CalMAN software. It is also one of the few software packages that is versatile enough to do just about everything that you might need with most meters.

Leonard

Probably. Not as many stations, either.

Leonard

What that has to do with it I dont know. If you find an RGB display with violet output, I'm all ears.

NT

With each colour channel you've got everything available from backlight output x LCD max down to backlight output x LCD minimum. AFAIK that covers every flesh tone on this planet, unless one goes down to 2000K backlight or some other very extreme value.

NT

This is simply not true. Every display has a color gamut that is limited by the maximum saturation of its primaries. You can produce any color within that gamut but not any outside. Even if every flesh tone is in that gamut, that does not mean that you will get the right flesh tones for a given combination of RGB. In order to do so, you must have the same spectrum in the primaries that you have in the camera filters, the correct colorimetry for the white point, and the correct application of the decoding matrix. If you depart from any of these, you can adjust a display for ONE color to be correct, but everything else will be off.

Leonard

It has everything to do with accurate reproduction of color in video.

What you seem to miss is that the underlying assumption in color reproduction in video is that the display and the camera both approximate the CIE standard observer curves for red, green, and blue spectral response. If this is the case, and you encode properly, you can use a standard decoding matrix on the display end and get a reasonable reproduction of what was recorded. If you have a very narrow spectrum on either end, some colors will be reproduced with less energy than with the proper spectrum. This can be compensated for using a customized matrix or LUTs.

Again, while it is true that you can make any color within a given gamut with some combination of R,G, & B, it is NOT true that you will get the CORRECT color for ALL colors if the decoding matrix is not correct (very common in many consumer sets over the years, if the gamut is wrong, if the gray scale is wrong, or if the spectrum is wrong. To get the right mix of colors for all colors in a given system, you have to play by the rules for that system. If you change them, such as is the case when you deviate in spectral response from the CIE curves, you have to make it up somewhere else. This gets very complicated and is precisely why some people who are sensitive to color reproduction have noticed that LED based displays have had trouble with some colors.

Leonard

I think that the important point is that the CIE standards are a subset of colors, not the millions of colors people think they are getting from a computer display.

Geoff.

You can't tweak the colour response of film, you can with CRTs or LCDs.

Go read some textbooks on the subject of colour management for screen & print. The topic is far too complex to sum up from first principles in a newsgroup post.

Indeed.