Post by dkennedy on Mar 17, 2005 7:58:20 GMT -5
March 16, 2005
By Alex Pham, LA Times Staff Writer
Do Not Adjust Your Set Part 1
New and complex high-definition TVs are reviving a 1950s-era practice: house calls by technicians to calibrate for the best picture.
Hagai Gefen spent thousands of dollars on a home entertainment system, but it wasn't picture perfect.
So he called in Joe Kane, who tunes television pictures the way piano tuners find the perfect pitch of A. Kane and a growing breed of technicians like him rely on their highly trained eyes to coax crisper pictures, richer colors and finer details out of the high-tech television sets anchoring more and more living rooms.
Gone are the days when twiddling the rabbit ears would tease a better picture from the snow on the screen. Although today's high-definition TVs render dazzling, theater-quality pictures, the technology inside has become mind-bogglingly complex. An improperly adjusted set can produce jaundiced, hazy, lifeless images.
Kane and his ilk make it right — for fees that range from $225 to well over $1,000.
"Technology may be at our fingertips, but many people don't know what buttons to press," said Joel Silver, president of the Imaging Science Foundation, an organization founded by Silver and Kane that trains and certifies calibrators.
"The old technology was mature and forgiving," Silver said. "So when a set was badly adjusted, it still looked OK. Now, with high-definition, there's no place to hide."
And because images are viewed and appreciated by human eyes in lighting conditions that can vary dramatically from living room to living room, there's only so much that machines can do to create a picture that's perfect for every home.
"In a completely dark room, I can come up with equations for what colors will always look like to the human eye," said Mark Fairchild, professor of color science and director of the Munsell Color Science Laboratory at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y.
"But in the real world, you have windows, different lighting, different room sizes, and our knowledge of color perception starts to break down. That's where we need a human to come in, look at your TV and tell you why it looks funny."
Human eyes have the ability to discern minute changes in color and light, said Dr. Michael F. Marmor, professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine. "Most people are pretty darn good at detecting fairly fine gradations in color," he said.
Gefen, for instance, knew his TV system, set up in the converted garage of his Woodland Hills home, wasn't right. He just wasn't sure why or how to fix it. But he was confident Kane would be. Gefen, who has a business that makes home theater components, was well aware of Kane's reputation.
"Joe is the master of color," Gefen said as he awaited Kane on a recent Monday afternoon. "He has a very good eye."
Kane, a 56-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair and a courtly demeanor, arrived, lugging a laptop, a light meter and a small black case stuffed with software. His stocky assistant, Marshall Bennett, trailed.
Gefen fired up his $12,000 Samsung front-projection television.
Everyone in the room marveled at the picture quality. Everyone, that is, except Kane.
"It's not very bright," Kane said. "Let's get a reading."
Bennett set up the spectra-radiometer, which measures the light reflected by the 8-foot-wide screen. "Eight foot-lamberts," Bennett called out. It should have been nine.
Among Kane's tools is a DVD that he popped into a computer hooked to the TV. The DVD contains dozens of test patterns, each created to show the flaws of the TV's capabilities. Kane pulled up one called Ramps & Steps. A checkerboard of blacks, grays and whites, it shows whether the contrast is set correctly.
"I'm looking at the entire dynamic range," Kane explained. "If the contrast is too high, like it is now, it removes the details above the white level."
As he ratcheted down the contrast, blocks of bright white suddenly acquired more depth and warmth, so what was once a big, indistinguishable block now is divided into bars of varying shades of white.
And so it went over the next three hours as Kane delved deep into the recesses of Gefen's TV, unearthing its flaws and fixing them one by one. From the brightness to the gray scale, and finally the colors.
By Alex Pham, LA Times Staff Writer
Do Not Adjust Your Set Part 1
New and complex high-definition TVs are reviving a 1950s-era practice: house calls by technicians to calibrate for the best picture.
Hagai Gefen spent thousands of dollars on a home entertainment system, but it wasn't picture perfect.
So he called in Joe Kane, who tunes television pictures the way piano tuners find the perfect pitch of A. Kane and a growing breed of technicians like him rely on their highly trained eyes to coax crisper pictures, richer colors and finer details out of the high-tech television sets anchoring more and more living rooms.
Gone are the days when twiddling the rabbit ears would tease a better picture from the snow on the screen. Although today's high-definition TVs render dazzling, theater-quality pictures, the technology inside has become mind-bogglingly complex. An improperly adjusted set can produce jaundiced, hazy, lifeless images.
Kane and his ilk make it right — for fees that range from $225 to well over $1,000.
"Technology may be at our fingertips, but many people don't know what buttons to press," said Joel Silver, president of the Imaging Science Foundation, an organization founded by Silver and Kane that trains and certifies calibrators.
"The old technology was mature and forgiving," Silver said. "So when a set was badly adjusted, it still looked OK. Now, with high-definition, there's no place to hide."
And because images are viewed and appreciated by human eyes in lighting conditions that can vary dramatically from living room to living room, there's only so much that machines can do to create a picture that's perfect for every home.
"In a completely dark room, I can come up with equations for what colors will always look like to the human eye," said Mark Fairchild, professor of color science and director of the Munsell Color Science Laboratory at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y.
"But in the real world, you have windows, different lighting, different room sizes, and our knowledge of color perception starts to break down. That's where we need a human to come in, look at your TV and tell you why it looks funny."
Human eyes have the ability to discern minute changes in color and light, said Dr. Michael F. Marmor, professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine. "Most people are pretty darn good at detecting fairly fine gradations in color," he said.
Gefen, for instance, knew his TV system, set up in the converted garage of his Woodland Hills home, wasn't right. He just wasn't sure why or how to fix it. But he was confident Kane would be. Gefen, who has a business that makes home theater components, was well aware of Kane's reputation.
"Joe is the master of color," Gefen said as he awaited Kane on a recent Monday afternoon. "He has a very good eye."
Kane, a 56-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair and a courtly demeanor, arrived, lugging a laptop, a light meter and a small black case stuffed with software. His stocky assistant, Marshall Bennett, trailed.
Gefen fired up his $12,000 Samsung front-projection television.
Everyone in the room marveled at the picture quality. Everyone, that is, except Kane.
"It's not very bright," Kane said. "Let's get a reading."
Bennett set up the spectra-radiometer, which measures the light reflected by the 8-foot-wide screen. "Eight foot-lamberts," Bennett called out. It should have been nine.
Among Kane's tools is a DVD that he popped into a computer hooked to the TV. The DVD contains dozens of test patterns, each created to show the flaws of the TV's capabilities. Kane pulled up one called Ramps & Steps. A checkerboard of blacks, grays and whites, it shows whether the contrast is set correctly.
"I'm looking at the entire dynamic range," Kane explained. "If the contrast is too high, like it is now, it removes the details above the white level."
As he ratcheted down the contrast, blocks of bright white suddenly acquired more depth and warmth, so what was once a big, indistinguishable block now is divided into bars of varying shades of white.
And so it went over the next three hours as Kane delved deep into the recesses of Gefen's TV, unearthing its flaws and fixing them one by one. From the brightness to the gray scale, and finally the colors.