Dolby Podcast Episode 34, February 14, 2008
Terry Paullin shares how professional video calibration works, and explains why you should adjust the color, tint, brightness, contrast and sharpness on a television set and how to do it yourself. Listener, Chris, finds out how to determine if his cable TV set-top box is transmitting Dolby Digital surround sound.
Don't miss Terry Paullin in The Calibrationist, Part II, Audio on February 28, 2008.
Hear them all: Listen to Dolbycast on iTunes® or subscribe using your favorite RSS reader.
Mentioned in this Episode
Jack Buser: Hello and welcome to Dolbycast! The insider's guide to entertainment technology from the experts at Dolby Laboratories. I'm Jack Buser.
Craig Eggers: And I'm Craig Eggers.
Jack: And we're here to give you the straight talk on everything you need to please your ears.
Craig: Welcome back to Dolbycast. Jack, it's good to see you again.
Jack: Good to see you as well.
Craig: No more CES crud. We sound pretty good, don't we?
Jack: I know. No more rain on top of that. It has been raining out here in the Bay Area now for so long. And now it's what, 60-65 degrees out there?
Craig: It's beautiful.
Jack: The sun, oh my god!
Craig: My oranges are doing well.
Jack: Really?
Craig: Yes.
Jack: You have oranges?
Craig: I have oranges and limes and lemons. Yeah.
Jack: Well, we don't have orange trees in the city of San Francisco . I'll tell you that right now.
Craig: You don't.
Jack: No. Nothing but concrete jungle everywhere I look, but I love it.
Craig: There you go.
Jack: I love it.
Craig: So, we have some really cool guests coming up in future podcasts.
Jack: Yes, we do.
Craig: In fact, this podcast begins that process, quite frankly.
Jack: Absolutely.
Craig: And we'll talk to that in just a second, but I understand you have a listener question.
Jack: That I do. This listener has written us in a couple of times. "Written us in"—there's my Kentucky coming out.
Craig: Written us in.
Jack: Who has written us a couple of times.
Craig: Is that "Lou—i—ville" or "Lou—uh—ville"?
Jack: That's Louisville popping out. He's written us a couple of times. Chris is having problems with his cable box. He heard us say that over 50 broadcast TV shows are in 5.1-channel sound, and he's having trouble figuring out what he needs to do with his cable service provider or cable box to make sure he's getting the right sound.
Craig: I hope Chris figures this out before our podcast, because I got to tell you that the Super Bowl and the Grammys in 5.1 were absolutely spectacular.
Jack: Two words: Daft Punk. Did you see it, with the pyramid?
Craig: No, I missed it. I missed it.
Jack: Kanye West with Daft Punk in the background.
Craig: I missed that.
Jack: Oh, man! That's who I've been telling you about this whole time.
Craig: Two words: Tom Petty.
Jack: Tom Petty?
Craig: For the first time, the Super Bowl show was incredibly good. Well worth my time. So great.
Jack: I thought the Super Bowl was really good. My gosh, what a great game.
Craig: Let's get to his question.
Jack: Before we go to the question, you brought up Daft Punk and I can't drop it.
Craig: OK.
Jack: Make sure you go back. If you've got to look it up on YouTube, look up Daft Punk, Kanye West and Grammys. The two robots in the pyramid that are playing the synthesizers on the touch screens...
Craig: Was one of them you?
Jack: That's my favorite band!
Craig: That's you favorite band?
Jack: That's Daft Punk. Those guys are incredible!
Craig: OK.
Jack: OK. Never mind.
Craig: OK.
Jack: Never mind. It's no Tom Petty. [laughs]
Craig: I'm going to go check it out. Hey, Tom was playing Vox Super Beatle amps. I started on those things.
Jack: So tell me, Craig, what do you do if you're having trouble getting 5.1 sound out of your cable box? What's the first thing you do?
Craig: I think the first thing we need to know is, is this cable box capable of receiving and decoding a Dolby Digital signal. Right?
Jack: Correct.
Craig: You could ask your cable provider.
Jack: That's the first think I would do.
Craig: An easy way would be to look at the back of the device itself. If it has an HDMI or a coaxial digital audio out or an optical audio out, chances are it probably...
Jack: That's a good sign.
Craig: That's a good sign.
Jack: Also, that Dolby logo on the front of the box is generally a good sign, too.
[laughter]
Craig: Really.
Jack: So if you have those two things, you're probably cooking.
Craig: If you're pretty much on that path, then the next thing to do is to probably go into the setup menu of your box. Because a lot of the boxes just pass out 2-channel out of them.
Jack: The idea is, especially if your box is provided by your service provider—which it generally is in North America —that the person comes in and is going to set all that up for you. But a lot of folks actually buy their 5.1 system after the cable guy came out, if you will. So it's not set up properly. You should either call up the folks at your cable company or satellite company or other service provider and have them come back and check out your box; or, if you're feeling adventurous, get into your setup menu yourself and see if you can flip on the right settings to make sure that Dolby Digital is enabled.
Craig: I think that works.
Jack: Either one works. Well, Craig, on that note...hopefully, Chris, good luck getting your cable system up and running. Send us a note if that works for you.
When we come right back, we're going to be introducing our very, very special guest for today.
Craig: Back in just a moment.
[music]
Announcer: Hey listeners! Got a question for Dolbycast? Contact us at dolbycast@dolby.com or our new toll free number 888-6-DOLBY-C.
Jack: And we're back here at Dolbycast and across from me is no longer Craig Eggers, but a man named Sparky. As our very special guest Terry Paullin has informed us, Terry and Craig, or should we say Sparky, go back a long way. Before the podcast, I was being told that that is actually your true name, Sparky. [laughs] Speechless.
Craig: I hereby deny that. Speechless is right. Those of you are familiar with Terry Paullin's in Widescreen Review know who Sparky is, and I claim no allegiance to Sparky. I claim no birthright to Sparky. Thanks a lot.
Jack: You are never going to live that down.
Craig: No, I won't.
Jack: But in the meantime, why don't we introduce Terry.
Craig: Terry used to be a very good friend of mine.
[laughter]
Craig: No, Terry's an industry veteran who has been around for a long time. I couldn't speak for him as well as he can obviously, but those of you who are familiar with Terry Paullin know that he's a great representative of the Imaging Science Foundation. He's a prolific writer who sometimes has a very sardonic wit when he goes about his writings. He's in Widescreen Review and other publications and works a lot with people in the industry. Terry, welcome to Dolbycast, I think.
Jack: Welcome Terry. [laughs]
Terry Paullin: Thank you. Thank both of you. I should probably say right off the top that the Sparky thing with Craig is maybe a tick unfair. I have much better stories about Craig that may come out during the session.
Jack: [laughs] This is great. Please come back as often as you please.
Craig: "Please come back as often as you please?"
Jack: I thought I'd throw two pleases in there. I've got to get these stories.
Craig: So Terry, tell us about yourself, first of all.
Terry: Oh gosh. I guess my AV history goes back about 15 years. I was a stereotypical Silicon Valley exec before I started Front Row Cinema, which is my home theater building company. I design, build and calibrate complete home theaters. I started writing for Widescreen Review about eight years ago. I have a monthly column entitled One Installer's Opinion.
Jack: …which is a great column.
Terry: Thank you very much.
I've done product reviews for a lot of magazines. I did a 9-page spread reviewing 29 products for Wired magazine a couple of years ago. They have a test edition that I did. I have an almost daily column in an online publication called HDTV Magazine now, and that's a lot of fun.
Jack: Very cool.
Terry: It's called Another Opinion. So it all ties in, you see. It's amazing.
Jack: It's all connected.
Terry: I also consult to industry on the topic of imaging science. Every now and then Joel Silver throws me a bone and I get a nice client that I can go consult with.
Craig: Indeed sir. [laughs]
Terry: Let's see what else? I do a lot of individual calibrations. All of these things feed on one another. If you're out there calibrating 2 to 3 times a week, you get to see the latest sets out there. You get to know their nuances and you get something to write about.
Jack: Cool.
Terry: I do all of that.
Craig: For our listeners, our focus for this particular podcast really was about video, about television, about optimizing your television set and about optimizing your home theater. Terry is a representative for ISF, the Imaging Science Foundation, and we thought he would be a great, great guest to have on the show.
Jack: So you're wearing the shirt, but there may be some of our listeners that don't know the Imaging Science Foundation.
Terry: Oh heaven forbid. The Imaging Science Foundation was founded sometime ago by both Joel Silver and Joe Kane. I think most of your listenership is probably familiar with both those names. Joel has the helm now.
And our business is about removing artifacts. Artifacts are anything that is in your picture that shouldn't be there. It wasn't in the source feed to begin with. And I am prepared to reveal a little known fact today that I hope Joel Silver doesn't get mad at, but we have a secret.
And what we really do when we calibrate a set is, after we fool around with the instrumentation, we ask the people to leave the room and we perform an exorcism.
[laughter]
I have a video bible that I drag out and I cite all of the artifacts. I confront the TV with the artifacts and it sweats a little bit and oozes green stuff out of the volume control. And then we clean it up, and it is all done. So it is really more about religion than science.
Jack: There is that wit. I have no idea what [cross talk] question to ask. So if I was to ask you who the average customer of your services or someone else who might be calling the ISF up for help, I mean who are these people, are these people that just bought a TV, are these very high end?
Terry: They are largely — they are just aficionados of good TV. And as people get into home theater, they start reading publications, they start reading that there is this thing called ISF and that calibrations might be a good thing. They aren't necessarily just high end. I have a lot of clients, who have a tough time coming up with a calibration fee, but they know that first of all, they made a big investment in their display monitor and they want it to be as good as it possibly can be and it cannot be that unless it is ISF-calibrated.
Craig: Terry, why is it not as good as it could be when I go and purchase and make this investment in a monitor?
Terry: Yeah, you would think that it would be — is you buy $7,000 Pioneer Kuro and you expect that out of the box, it is going to be near perfect. And the reason it can't be is because the manufacturer does not know where you are going to put that set. It is all about the light environment.
And you could be placing that flat panel in a completely dark dedicated theater or you could be putting it in the sun room. And the settings for that set are quite different in those 2 environments, and they don't know where you are going to put it. The one thing that they do know is that one set out of a thousand is going to get taken out of the box and put on flat panel row at Circuit City or Best Buy and it has to compete with everything else that is on the wall. And to essentially an uneducated eye, brighter is better.
So they have it in what we call "torch mode", where the contrast turns all the way up and the brightness probably close to being all the way up. You are missing a lot of the picture when the set is calibrated that way. It is not calibrated, it is just a set there. It is the factory default. And that is not how you want it in your living room.
Craig: So the factory default settings aren't exactly the best way to enjoy what the director wanted us to see?
Terry: They are almost certainly the wrong settings, and yes, that is a good point, that is what we are all about at ISF, is preserving the director's art. We want you to see exactly what Steven Spielberg or his cinematographer saw in the monitor on the set when you are watching the movie at home. That is the best you can hope for and that is what we try to do there. Thankfully, since the early 30s, there are standards for video display and transmission and that is all we are trying to do, is get the set to behave to those rules.
Terry: So if I can't afford you and by the way, you did a great job on my set, thank you very much.
[laughter]
Terry: Even though you called me Sparky, thank you very much.
Terry: We will get to your set later.
Craig: Oh, that is what I am afraid of. So if I can't afford you or if I am — obviously television sets come with consumer-adjustable controls: sharpness, brightness, color, tint, whatever, what type of advice would you give somebody who has just bought a television set, maybe isn't ready to make the investment into ISF calibration, but they want to optimize and get the very best performance out of their television set before they call you?
Terry: Well, there are some solutions that can get you part way there. There are a large number of test discs out in the market. Most of them come with enough narrative to walk you through them if you are not familiar with their terminology or what to do. Joe Kane's disc is a particularly good one; there are several others that are good.
Jack: The HD DVD I have and I will attest to. It is fabulous, absolutely fabulous to mess around with.
Terry: You are talking about the player itself.
Jack: The disc.
Terry: Oh the disc.
Jack: It is the HD DVD disc.
Terry: Joe's disc.
Jack: Jose's disc, but I will be the first to admit that I only half way know what I am doing and I got to call you guys at some point.
Terry: See, that's job security for us calibrators, we know you are going to screw it up and then we get the call the next day. Those discs do a reasonably good job. The thing that those discs cannot do is grayscale calibration or getting color temperature right. That takes instrumentation, even educated eyes can't tell 6,500 kelvin when we see it. So we come out with color analyzers and a number of other pieces of test equipment. They aid us in getting the right color temperature.
Craig: I want to get back to that Terry because that's a very important part of what you guys do, but let's talk about the front panel controls of a television set. There is a sharpness control and I have learned from talking to you guys, working with Joe and Joel. In the past the sharpness control was not a very good thing, talk about the sharpness control?
Terry: Well, I will talk about all of them, because I think that is what you want me to do.
Craig: Yeah.
Jack: [laughs]
Terry: The set of front panel controls — we often refer to them as user controls — are color, tint, brightness, contrast and sharpness. Those are available on almost every commercial set. There are lots of other controls now as you scan the menus of the latest generation sets. And they are often confusing and often misleading and in general we turn those off when we calibrate, but let's just stay with the 5 fundamental user controls.
We have done an excellent job in this industry of completely confusing consumers with our nomenclature. Brightness doesn't control brightness at all.
Craig: It controls black.
Terry: It controls black level. It is setting — there are 2 points that are real important in calibration, one of them is absolute black and the other one is peak white or absolute white. And we also refer to those, for your readers who have been reading all this stuff on this topic, 0 IRE and 100 IRE, those represent black and white, respectively.
And until those are set right and this brings in the issue of ambient light in the room, 0 black is going to be set at quite different positions of the brightness control depending on how much light is in the room. That's why a manufacturer cannot pre-calibrate, pre-ISF calibrate a set and send it to you, because he doesn't know what your room lighting is.
Jack: So here comes my question, brightness control sets the black level?
Terry: Absolutely.
Jack: All right. So I think I am not confused anymore, although that word "brightness" absolutely confuses and what you are doing is you are setting the level of 0 IRE or...?
Terry: I am setting the black level to 0 IRE.
Jack: I see. Ah, I knew I didn't know what I was doing.
[laughter]
Terry: The other one is even worse and that is the contrast control and the contrast control sets peak white. See, it is not contrast at all, because contrast is the division of black level into white level.
Jack: That's the rate.
Terry Paullin: What the contrast control actually sets is peak white and we are adjusting then to 100 IRE. OK, so it is even more confusing.
Jack: Yes, it is.
Terry: Yeah.
Jack: But I get it now.
Terry: And to further confuse things, contrast is not called contrast on some sets. Sony calls it "picture". I think JVC professional is now calling it "picture" as well.
Jack: Interesting.
Terry: So it is really tough for a consumer to ferret out this.
Jack: How do I know what 100 IRE is? Do I have to buy a…? That's where you guys really come in and you have the right instrumentation to really set those levels and detect.
Terry: We have test patterns and they are often called PLUGE patterns; PLUGE comes from the BBC, it is "Picture Line-Up Generator Equipment" and it is...
Jack: Sparky!
Craig Eggers: Didn't know Sparky knew that, did you?
Jack: Sparky is sharp I am telling you.
[laughter]
Terry: We have stripes on screen and those are mastered onto the disc as -2 IRE, +2 IRE and +4 IRE. And so while you are adjusting the brightness control, you don't want to see the -2 IRE pattern, you just barely want to see the +2 IRE pattern and obviously the 4 IRE pattern should be prominent.
Jack: Is -2 what they call "blacker than black"?
Terry: "Black below black"; if that is not confusing, I don't know what is.
Jack: But you shouldn't see that.
Terry: Should not.
Jack: Oops.
[laughter]
Terry: Maybe I have a client here.
Craig: I think this guy is Sparky quite frankly.
[laughter]
Jack: I get it.
Craig: So we got contrast and we got brightness. So sharpness?
Terry: Sharpness is the one that for the longest time, we used to say and we were right when we said it, is that there should not be a sharpness control on the set.
Craig: Turn it off.
Jack: Really.
Terry: You should turn it all the way down. What that causes is edge enhancement. It is the little halo that you see around — the test pattern for it actually has a bunch of alpha-numerics on screen. And you just look at any of them and you see a little halo and you turn sharpness down until the halo goes away, and on most sets it will. Some sets, it can't get entirely rid of it, but that's...
Craig: And if you have sharpness up too high, you will often notice on edges in the picture, it will be like ringing.
Jack: Yeah.
Terry: It is also called ringing and it is not a good thing. It creates an artifact that was not in the source material. We want to be rid of it and of course, we wonder why consumers are confused. You may recall this was couple of Super Bowls ago, the RCA commercial that had the sharpness control that went off screen, it broke the window, and it chased the dog down the street...
[laughter]
Jack: I know that commercial.
Terry: Yeah. So the implication is being more sharpness the better.
Jack: Right.
Terry: It is just the opposite.
Jack: So if I have a sharpness control on my set, should I just by default turn it all the way down or will that artificially make the picture softer on some sets?
Terry: Well, if you can't call an ISF calibrator, try it all the way down, put some alpha-numerics on-screen and turn it up until you start to see that ringing and the little halo, and then back it off until it is not there.
Jack: Interesting. Well listen, we got to go to our break. Terry, thank you so much for sharing all your wisdom. When we come back, we want to hear more.
Craig: We will talk about color temperature.
Jack: Absolutely, that is very true.
[Music interlude]
Announcer: Hey listeners, you can now call in your questions to our new toll-free phone line 888-6-DOLBY-C.
Craig: And we are back at Dolbycast with our special guest, Mr. Terry Paullin. You know Terry, when you drive home from work at night and sometimes you are driving past homes and the TV is on in a home, typically the color you see coming out of the house is a blue light?
Terry: You are absolutely right.
Craig: But if you look at the incandescent lights that are on in a house at night, those typically tend to be yellow and red. Both of those points speak to color temperature, don't they?
Terry: They do.
Craig: So color temperature is really important because as you said when you buy a television set at a big box retailer, it is big and bright. How do manufacturers make those sets big and bright, Terry?
Terry: Well, there are a lot of tricks to making sets bright. One of them of course is turning the gain of the video amplifier all the way up, which is the control we call "contrast"; we already talked about that. Another thing that they do, it is a well known fact at least among manufacturers that blue-white actually appears brighter than white. And so what happens is, they purposely adjust the color temperature of the set when it is put in the box to be very far away from where it should be to comply with NTSC, now NTSC standard.
Craig: And that's why the sets look blue?
Terry: That's why they look blue.
Jack: Are you kidding?
Craig: So what is color — how do we explain color temperature to our audience?
Terry: Well, it can get fairly involved to really get down into the nuts and bolts of it, but I guess the way I'd describe it is there is one correct point, everything else is wrong and everything else is probably wrong because the manufacturer put it that way, so that it would attract your attention when you went to the showroom floor and you saw blue-white and you said "that set is brighter than the one next to it, therefore it must be better."
Jack: So there is only one correct setting, but now my set has multiple color temperature settings?
Terry: It does.
Jack: So the rest of — there is one that is right.
Terry: That's correct.
Jack: Which one is right?
Terry: The one that is right is the one that — it may say — well it can say a lot of different things. The thing that we actually adjust to is 6500 kelvin. Kelvin is a metric. What you don't want to see is degrees kelvin; that is redundant. Kelvin implies degrees; it is a metric itself.
But what it really means is the mix of red, green and blue, because everything we do in television sets from the camera, to the display, to our eyes, is all done in red, green and blue and mixes of those three. So when we mix red, green and blue in the right proportions, we get something that is equivalent to a color temperature of 6500 kelvins.
Jack: That is really, really interesting.
Terry: That is the thing that requires instrumentation. We have color analyzers that we put on screen and we indeed adjust red and green and blue, adding or subtracting, until we have the right color temperature. But it is not good enough to have the right color temperature at just one point on the set, for instance 50 IRE, which could be halfway from black to white. What we really want to do, and this is the art of calibration, is get that same color temperature everywhere from, let's say, 10 IRE to 90 IRE.
Jack: So this is a problem that I at least have on my display, which is, it sometimes and maybe it is the light in our room or something, it just seems like there is some kind of color shift across the screen. It is very, very subtle. But if you look at a pure white screen, it seems to kind of maybe go a little bluish on one end. Is that possible, is that something that is common, is that something you can fix?
Terry: Well, what's possible is that you may have a problem with your monitor. It shouldn't do that.
Jack: It is not there all the time, it is like every once in a while I see it, I am like is that actually happening?
Terry: Yeah, see there is a lot of things involved and the right answer to that, one of the things you would need to evaluate is does your particular display have white field uniformity, is it consistently white all around? And that requires a test pattern and instrumentation. Your eye is a pretty good tool in terms of deciding whether an image that is supposed to be white has any color in it, but instrumentation helps and there are a lot of test patterns that we would use to determine that.
Jack: I got to get you guys in.
Terry: But there is also, you have to consider the source in all of these things. All content providers, meaning cable companies, satellite companies of either flavor, aren't always the best at monitoring the feed, you know, from the head end. They really should be watching things a little more closely and sometimes you will get images that have huge amount of what we call red push, everybody looks sunburned. You change channels and everything will be right. You change channels again and things will be blue.
So, there isn't a lot of consistency and that's one of the reasons that we use standards off of a DVD. So that when we calibrate, we are calibrating from the DVD player, the cable that hooks the DVD player to the receiver, the receiver, the cable that goes from the receiver to the TV - that whole video chain gets calibrated. That's what you want. And then when you go back to a cable feed, for instance, you know, you are on a different input of the TV and they have different memory and so we really should calibrate that input, too. But we don't have the standard that we do with DVD.
Craig: So when Terry comes out to your house, he'll start with a grayscale pattern from 0 IRE to one hundred IRE and he will start adjusting for D6,500 or 6,500 degrees or 6,500 Kelvin [laughs]...
Jack: I know from chemistry not to say "degrees Kelvin". I know that...
Craig: the result if a very, very linear and that's the goal to get a very, very linear performance from the blackest black up to the brightest bright.
Jack: I've heard you guys have special codes and stuff that you can get inside the brains of the set and normal people can't get into, is that true?
Terry: That's correct.
Craig: We mere mortals are unable to actually...
Terry: Exactly. You would be dangerous if you [laughs] knew, we'd have to kill you.
Jack: What is inside...what happens in the manufacturer codes or I don't know what are you refer to them as?
Terry: I really can't tell you. No, every set has a set of service codes and they are accessed through the remote control and you call up the right service code and you get into a whole different menu that the user never gets to see and that allows you to adjust things that are required to be adjusted to get color temperature right and other things. We fix geometry. There are a lot of things you can do when you get into a service menu, depending on the manufacturer and depending on the robustness of the service menu.
Jack: The manufacturers... I've have been reading lots of articles in magazines that you write for and it seems to me some of the manufacturers actually are getting very open to the idea of working with you guys to, ...
Terry: Some are. Some aren't. The reason is that you know, Joe Six-pack, if he gets that code he can get in there and basically make the set where it has to go back to the manufacturer to get fixed. I have to say in Sparky's defense, in the early days Toshiba, and thanks to Craig, was a very good friend of the ISF and they allowed us to get at codes and he worked with us and we had some of our very best early success with Toshibas. It's all thanks to Craig and we do appreciate that. We always will.
Craig: So, Terry, going back to the days of picture tubes when you would calibrate a set that was primarily CRT-driven, picture tube-driven, when you had a properly calibrated a lot of times you would lose a lot of detail in the background, particularly in darker scenes. And this was explained to me that it was because of something we call gamma. Can you speak about gamma, gamma correction and how it impacts and influences our displays of the past as well as our displays moving forward?
Terry: Yes. Gamma was a great college fraternity when I was going to school and we had a lot of fun, drinking a lot of beer. Gamma is the linearity of the grayscale. So I talked about getting 6,500 Kelvin correct at all levels of luminance or brightness or 10 IRE - 20, 30, 50, 90.
If the correct gamma is built into the set, it will be linear. Now the whole reason that there is such a thing as gamma, it's interesting and I don't know that we have the time for this whole discussion, but when there were CRTs and they were CRTs in vacuum tubes, in other words, in the cameras and in the displays which is what a CRT is, a vacuum tube, they don't behave in a linear fashion. They never have. And so what we had to do is we had to add this thing called gamma to get them linear.
Now, comes all these fixed pixel and other technologies, because we have to emulate the CRT. Because we've got 60 years of archived content that has to play back on these new technologies and look like it did on the CRTs, because that's how they were mastered.
So we have to... what we are doing with gamma, is we're making DLP and plasmas and LCD devices behave like CRTs. That's really what gamma's doing. Yeah, and it's just a legacy thing that we have to deal with and that's why it's there and some sets have adjustable gamma that the user can switch and is bound to get in trouble with that.
Jack: We are running out of time, Terry. Don't want to miss two controls that you can gloss over them if we cover them, but just so I'll never forgive myself if I don't ask: The color and tint controls.
Terry: Yeah. Well, let's see in 2 seconds or less. Color really adjusts something called saturation. Its how much color is actually in the image that we are looking at. When you over-saturate you can, this is where people get this red push, can get sunburned and too much color is not a good thing. People are very sensitive to color settings. They like bright vivid colors. They may not know the right terminology when they see over-saturation, they'll not like it.
A whole good topic for another discussion would be how important color is versus something that people put way too much weight on which is called resolution. That's again another topic.
So, color is the amount of color in a picture is really saturation and that's a control on the TV.
There is tint, which adjusts again the amount of red and green going in, but not on the service control level. It's just making the set either greener or redder. That's what a tint control does. And we have patterns again that we use to adjust to and we know when it's right. It's not something that's left up to a subjective call.
Jack: That's what I noticed with all the test patterns trying to get the color right. I didn't even know where to begin because my eyes don't have all those meters built in, I guess.
Terry: The better sets have positions you can put them in via the service menu called the "blue only" mode that will allow you to set saturation much better than you can with the tools that are generally provided, which is a blue filter, which you look through and you look at a test pattern and get certain things to match up, but those are important controls. Those all have to be right before you start into the grayscale.
Craig: So listeners, you now have been ISF'ed.
Jack: That's right and if a listener can use to find you or the ISF, how can they do that?
Terry: Well, there's an ISF website. I believe its imagingscience.com. I haven't gone there in a while, myself. But I am sure that's it.
Jack: If you google "imaging science", the ISF will pop right up.
Terry: Absolutely.
Craig: There are ISF calibrators across the country, in fact across the globe, right, Terry?
Terry: There are. There are. Well, I'll leave it at that.
Jack: All right. Well, for our listeners out there. Hopefully you have gotten something out of this. I know, for one, my mind is blown. I've learned so much from this one, Terry, thank you so much for coming in.
Craig: And there's so much more you could learn Jack, especially with that projector of yours.
Jack: I know.
Craig: So we're going to have to have Terry back.
Terry: We didn't get to projecting on a flat wall. Darn it.
[Laughing and chatting]
Jack: Well thank you so much for coming in. We are Dolbycast. I'm Jack Buser and don't even say your name is Craig at this point.
Craig:Have a good day.
Jack:Bye-bye.
[laughing]
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