[opendtv] LATimes: Do Not Adjust Your Set
- From: Henry Baker <hbaker1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 08:45:37 -0800
FYI --
March 16, 2005
COLUMN ONE
Do Not Adjust Your Set
New and complex high-definition TVs are reviving a 1950s-era practice: house
calls by technicians to calibrate for the best picture.
By Alex Pham, Times Staff Writer
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.
Next Kane set his sights on the DVD player, because a TV is only as good as the
devices that feed it with images. A calibrator, Kane explained, adjusts not
only the TV, but also everything hooked into the TV. Gefen, for example, has a
PC and a DVD player.
Gefen popped "Finding Nemo" into the DVD player. While others in the room were
quickly drawn into the story of the little clownfish, Kane was driven to
distraction by the grays on the screen.
"The gray scale is messy," Kane declared. "It's blurry. The lines are not
clear." To demonstrate, he rewound to the title screen. Sure enough, the movie
logo had a barely detectable fuzz around the edges of the word "Nemo."
Kane asked the brand of the DVD player.
"It's a Denon," Gefen answered.
"A 3910?" Kane ventured, guessing correctly at the model number. "It probably
needs new software. Let's see."
Sure enough, Kane found out that the software was several versions out of date.
"Don't worry. I've got the latest update back at my office," Kane reassured
Gefen.
They popped in a DVD of "The Matrix."
Gefen beamed at his TV.
"I think it's much better," Gefen said. "You can really see the difference in a
dark scene. Before some of the faces were shaded. After the adjustment, you
could see the entire face."
Still, Kane saw problems in the irregular colors on the dark walls in one scene
at the beginning of the movie. He shook his head and promised to return with
updated software.
Calibrators like Kane are trained to pay attention to conditions outside the
set, such as the type of lighting in a room, that can affect the way a TV
picture looks.
"Tungsten lights tend to be yellowish," said Fairchild of the Rochester
Institute of Technology. "So you have to adjust the white to be a little
yellower so the two will neutralize each other. Otherwise, the picture will
look bluish."
Then there is the tendency among manufacturers to set their TVs at their
maximum brightness, so that their products grab more attention in a crowded
retail show floor with bright fluorescent lights.
"Typically, a TV is set up to look good in stores," Fairchild said. "At home,
that same set just looks too saturated, too bright and unnatural."
Manufacturers often include two or three predefined settings, such as "movie,"
which adjusts the set for viewing in a dark room; "dynamic," which has a high
sharpness for viewing sports programs; and "brilliant," which is the default
setting on most TV sets.
Rotating through these preset modes is relatively easy ? some manufacturers
such as Sony Corp. even devote a button on their remote controls to doing just
that. For the most part, those modes are fine for most consumers, Fairchild
said.
"The consumer is the ultimate judge of whether their set looks OK," Fairchild
said. "Some people just want the latest plasma and don't care what it looks
like. It's a shame, but people also buy expensive cars that they don't know how
to drive."
That needn't be the case, said Silver of the Imaging Science Foundation.
"Not everyone gets the same quality out of the same TV set," Silver said. "If
you paid thousands of dollars for that set, you want to optimize what you paid
for. And that requires a professional person who can set it up so all you have
to do is go home and press 'play.' We help you get to the next level of image
quality."
That's because doing anything beyond the preset modes requires diving into an
underworld of sub-menus with a dizzying array of controls identified by an
alphabet soup of letters and numbers, such as "DNIE," "DDP1011" and "CXA2171."
All this adds up to a situation not unlike the 1950s and 1960s, when
technicians delivered TV sets to homes and installed them. The job sometimes
involved demagnetizing the sets and clambering to rooftops to set up antennas.
Kane earned his way through college ? first at Alfred State College in New
York, then at the Rochester Institute of Technology ? repairing and installing
TV sets.
After a 10-year stint as an engineer at Eastman Kodak Co., Kane moved to Los
Angeles in 1982 to be closer to the studios that produced the shows that
appeared on the TV sets he worked on. He saw cinematographers spend hundreds of
hours transferring film into video that could be broadcast to millions of TV
sets.
"It became clear to me that display devices are like blank canvases," Kane
said. "And if the artist's intent is to be communicated, the canvases all have
to be the same. But not all TVs were the same. My job was to close the loop on
an ideal mass communication device by making them look as close as possible to
the original."
Kane tried to do this in two ways ? by persuading TV manufacturers to build
their sets according to standards set by the National Television System
Committee, an organization that sets technical standards for TVs, and by
training other calibrators.
"I can't tune each of the 25 million TV sets that gets sold each year, so I try
to tell others how to do it," Kane said.
Kane's work in promoting calibration has garnered the appreciation of
cinematographers.
"When someone takes the time to calibrate their TV set, they're more likely to
see the full potential of the images that the filmmakers have put into that
picture," said Allen Daviau, a cinematographer who has worked on films such as
"Bugsy," "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," "The Color Purple" and "Van Helsing."
As an example, Daviau points to the opening scene of "Van Helsing." The images
are black and white, an homage to horror films of the 1930s and 1940s. A TV set
that's set too brightly will display the nuances in the dark areas of the
movie, he said.
"You won't get the mystery of the shadows," Daviau said. "The way you get
impact is by using the full contrast range to guide the eye. Some things you
want coming right at the audience. Other things, you want to hide until the
right moment, when you reveal it. It can be something as simple as somebody
walking out of the dark into the light. We want to find the right moment and
guide the audience's eye. We achieve this through a choreography of light and
shadow."
In movie theaters, the environment is strictly controlled for optimum viewing.
There are no bright windows. The walls, even the seats, are dark so there's no
glare on the screen. Aside from the exit signs and the dim illumination of the
aisles, all lights are turned off. That makes calibration a far easier
exercise, even though the same basic steps are taken to gauge a projector's
picture quality.
A calibrator of home TVs, however, has to tweak their settings to accommodate a
host of imperfect viewing environments.
"That's where the art comes in," Kane said.
Over the years, Kane has trained dozens of calibrators, including David Abrams,
an amiable 23-year-old who works for Kane as a project coordinator when he's
not calibrating sets.
Abrams enrolled in the Imaging Science Foundation's 18-hour course right after
high school. Like Kane, he paid his way through college tuning TVs, making as
much as $1,000 in one weekend.
Freelance calibrators can gross as much as $140,000 a year working six days a
week, Abrams estimated, although he's no longer calibrating full time. The
foundation estimates there are close to 3,000 certified calibrators in the
U.S., about 95% of whom are men.
The vast majority of Abrams' clients are middle-class video enthusiasts. That's
a big shift from when Abrams started out.
"Five years ago, most of my clients were dealers who were installing $500,000
systems," Abrams said. "We saw the shift towards mass market a few years ago
when prices started coming down for HDTVs. Now, we're starting to see the
Circuit City and Best Buy crowd."
That has ramped up demand for calibrators, said Silver of the foundation, which
offers two courses a month.
"Our classes are filling up months in advance," he said. "But we can't offer
more because I can't get calibrators to teach them. They're all too busy
working."
What sets calibrators apart from average TV viewers is not just the 18-hour
course, but their experienced eyes. "It may well be that practice is what makes
perfect," said Stanford's Marmor.
Kane agreed, saying his eyesight wasn't particularly special.
What sets good calibrators apart, Kane said, is experience and an understanding
that it is "always about the art. It's about creating a canvas for people to be
able to tell their stories."
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