Your host has written about his audiovisual obsessions before, but generally in terms of drooling over equipment (which he doubts Bill Poser will be joining him in anytime soon) or correcting idiotic comments by others. But this past evening he had an experience which illuminated some basic truths for him.
Yesterday afternoon, SC had a new ceiling fixture installed in his home office. Given the opportunity, he decided to try GE's new Reveal light bulbs, which are supposed to be corrected for the yellow bias in typical incandescent bulbs. Once nighttime finally arrived, it was possible to directly compare the subjective appearance of the light with conventional bulbs installed in the same room. The results were dramatic -- seen side by side, it was impossible not to conclude that the Reveal bulbs were in fact considerably whiter, at least subjectively.
Without one of these around to verify SC's impressions, everything else your host will say here has to be taken with a grain of salt.
Most people have never seen a properly calibrated TV set. In fact, the NTSC standards which specify our broadcast and transmission protocols call for the colors emitted by your TV to appear as though they were emitted by a blackbody (a theoretical construct we won't cover here; see this for more) at a temperature of 6500 degrees Kelvin. This choice is not accidental; In practice, most sets come from the factory at 10-11,000 degrees Kelvin, which pushes the image to look substantially more blue than it should be (but which also makes it look a lot brighter). This is done for the excellent reason that people tend to assume brightness correlates directly with picture quality. Unfortunately, it also grossly skews our perception of what colors ought to look like on a TV.
There are, however, ways to calibrate your set, and they aren't too expensive (at least to get 80% or so of the way there). Getting Video Essentials or Avia allows you to manually correct for much of the distortion engineered in at the factory. Many people find that they dislike the results of calibration, at least initially, because the picture is usually substantially lower in brightness than it was before you started. This is not to say that calibration = darkness, but unless you have a good set to start, the resulting brightness can be a bit disappointing. However, once you've seen a correct presentation of color (not to mention picture geometry), it's very hard to go back. To give you an idea of what the difference is like, this example provided by Dr. Floyd Toole of Harman International illustrates what happens when you're working with a light source with uneven output across the spectrum. Since the caption in the picture doesn't mention it, the bottom picture is filtered to reflect what the top one would have looked like if it was painted under a light where the red portion of the spectrum was 3 dB more intense than the rest, and then viewed in normal daylight. (The context is a presentation Dr. Toole gave to a convention of the Audio Engineering Society; a good summary can be found here, but an even better one can be found in issue 28 of The Audio Critic, a magazine which publishes around once a year, depending on the editor/author's mood. Since it's not online, I can't link to it.)
Thus, except for the battery-saving mode on his laptop, SC calibrates all of his displays with Video Essentials. Since it is not practical to maintain near-total darkness around all displays that your host uses, some of them have been calibrated with incandescent lights on in the environment. Assuming that the Reveal bulb's spectrum truly is as it appears to be -- more nearly an approximation to daylight than a regular incandescent bulb -- then even SC's calibrated displays are still not correctly rendering video. The rest of SC's home office looks notably different now, though, so it won't be long before Chez SC is wholly wired with Reveal lighting.
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