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| Products » Home Theater » | Datacolor ColorFacts Professional |
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Datacolor ColorFacts Professional Technical Articles
Widescreen Review Shootout Any time you have competing organizations put into a contest designed to determine the quality of their products, you are bound to have a dispute over the results. This happened in the first color analyzer shoot-out, and it happened in the second color analyzer shoot-out at Widescreen Review Magazine as well. In this contest at Widescreen Review, readings were taken at 30 and 80 IRE for all displays that were measured, and also at 20 IRE for the CRT-based displays. At both the 30 and 80 IRE luminance levels, the ColorFacts CF-6000 returned excellent results for all displays (averaging just over 0.002 from the reference device). However, the 20 IRE results are in dispute, and the meaning of the data is open to interpretation. The main issue is that the reference instrument itself was not capable of returning highly accurate results at the 20 IRE level in the Widescreen Review testing room. It is possible that the three products entered into the contest were able to produce more accurate results at 20 IRE than the reference instrument in the Widescreen Review shootout, which makes it difficult to assign any real meaning to the results of the readings taken at 20 IRE. Because of the difficulty that the reference instrument had in measuring 20 IRE, the critical question becomes: "How shall we define 'accurate'?" Is matching the results of an inaccurate reference device "accurate"? Is there a common sense aspect to determining what "accurate" means? Is there simply no way to make any conclusions about accuracy without a reference device with which to compare? I will simply present you some of the data from the Widescreen Review shootout and let you be the judge. Immediately below, you will see three graphs of data from the Widescreen Review shootout. There is one graph for the Sencore CP-5000 product, one graph for the Milori ColorFacts CF-6000 product and one graph for the PhotoResearch PR-650 "Reference" instrument. On each graph the "x" and "y" values have been plotted for each instrument, with data interpolated where it was not empirically available.
As you can see, all three instruments had a similar response from 30 IRE to 100 IRE in the Widescreen Review contest (the right-hand 2/3rd of the graphs). However, below 30 IRE all three instruments returned very different responses. This display was a Princeton analog CRT display that does not contain an adjustable LUT ("look up table"), and does not exhibit sudden and dramatic chromatic shifts in the gray scale (as a device with an adjustable LUT might). The common sense expectation would be for a fairly predictable response for both the "x" and "y" chromacity coordinates across the gray scale. Study the Widescreen Review graphs closely. Which analyzer would you say appears intuitively most accurate? Which graph would you expect matches most closely an analog CRT display with no adjustable LUT? If you saw this Princeton display with your eyes (the ultimate reference), would you expect to see a dramatic chromatic shift between 20 and 30 IRE? Does matching the reference instrument make an analyzer more accurate if the reference instrument is exhibiting the behavior shown here? Can we make any real inferences of what it means to match the reference instrument in this case? The final question: Can common sense have a role in determining accuracy? We will leave these questions open, as they are indeed without answer. It is ultimately up to you to come to your own conclusions about what the Widescreen Review Shootout results mean and whether any conclusion can be drawn from them. Back to Technical Articles |
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