THE GRAMOPHONE WIRE
TV & VIDEO ISSUE NO. 2
ALL THOSE BUTTONS IN YOUR TV MENU CAN BE CONFUSING. MAKE THEM LESS SO WITH THIS HANDY GUIDE FROM GRAMOPHONE. 3 COMMON VIDEO TERMINOLOGY CONTRAST & BRIGHTNESS: 4 A SIMPLE GUIDE TO SETTING THEM CORRECTLY 6 SETTING YOUR TV’S COLOR TEMPERATURE THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF REFRESH RATE 7 AND WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU 8 LET’S TALK NUMBERS & TVS
AUTOMATIC BRIGHTNESS CONTROL
In display devices, the self-acting mechanism which controls brightness of the device as a function of ambient light.
BRIGHTNESS
The attribute of visual perception in accordance with which an area appear to emit more of less light. (Luminance is the recommended name for the photo-electric quantity which has also been called brightness.)
CONTRAST
The range of light to dark values in a picture or the ratio between the maximum and minimum brightness values.
DEFINITION
The aggregate of fine details available on-screen. The higher the definition of an image, the greater the number of details that can be discerned by the human eye or displayed. During video recording and subsequent playback, several factors can conspire to cause a loss of definition.
FIBER OPTICS
Use of light transmitted through fibers. The technology of transferring information, e.g., in communications or computer technology, through thin flexible glass or plastic tubes of optical fibers using modulated light waves.
HDTV (HIGH-DEFINITION TELEVISION)
a) General term for standards pertaining to consumer high-resolution TV. b) A TV format capable of displaying on a wider screen (16:9) as opposed to the conventional 4:3 and at higher resolution. Rather than a single HDTV standard, the FCC has approved several different standards, allowing broadcasters to choose which to use. This means newer TV sets will have to support all of them. All of the systems will be broadcast as component digital.
OLED
An OLED (organic light-emitting diode) is a light-emitting diode (LED) in which the emissive electroluminescent layer is a film of organic compound which emits light in response to an electric current. An OLED display works without a backlight; thus, it can display deep black levels and can be thinner and lighter than a liquid crystal display (LCD).
PIXEL
Short for Picture Element. The most basic unit of an image displayed on a computer or video display screen. Pixels are generally arranged in rows and columns; a given combination among the pixels of various brightness and color values forms an image.
RESOLUTION
The act, process, or capability of distinguishing between two separate but adjacent parts or stimuli, such as elements of detail in an image, or similar colors. Vertical resolution refers to the number of horizontal black and white lines that can be resolved in the picture height. Horizontal resolution refers to the black and white lines resolved in a dimension equal to the vertical height and may be limited by the video amplifier bandwidth.
CONTRAST & BRIGHTNESS: A simple guide to setting them correctly by Geoffrey Morrison
If you’ve never adjusted your TV’s Contrast and Brightness controls,
your TV probably doesn’t look its best. With just a few minutes effort, your TV can look better. If you’ve ever had a hard time seeing something in the shadows of a dark scene, or wondered why you can’t see the moguls on a ski competition, this is the guide for you. To put it as simply: “Contrast” controls the bright parts of the image, and “Brightness” controls the dark parts. However, the tricky part is, turning up the Contrast past a certain point won’t make the TV any brighter, and turning the Brightness control all the way down won’t actually make the TV darker. Finding that specific point is key.
THE TRICKY PART IS, TURNING UP THE CONTRAST PAST A CERTAIN POINT WON’T MAKE THE TV ANY BRIGHTER, AND TURNING THE BRIGHTNESS CONTROL ALL THE WAY DOWN WON’T ACTUALLY MAKE THE TV DARKER. FINDING THAT SPECIFIC POINT IS KEY. If you set the Contrast too high the image will look blown out, like it’s overexposed. Turning it too low, and it will look washed out and flat. The best way to set the Contrast control is using a scene of snow or a bright cloudy sky. Turn the control down about halfway, and then move it up. Stop when the clouds or snow start losing detail. You want them to be bright, but not washed out (and lacking detail). A white blob is not a cloud. Setting the Brightness control too low, and the image will look underexposed and mostly dark, like wearing your sunglasses at night. Set it too high, and everything will be washed out and objects that are supposed to be black will be grayish. The best scenes to use to set brightness are night scenes with people in dark clothes. Turn the brightness control way up, so everything’s flat and washed out, then turn it down until you start losing detail in the clothing (then tick it back up a few steps). Sometimes parts of the image should be too dark to see, but what a main character is wearing is usually something the director wants visible. This control might take a little bit of fiddling, with different shows or movies. If you want to go one step further, a video setup disc (Blu-ray or DVD), will have test patterns to help you get each setting perfect.
In order to get the best from your TV you need to put the best into it. This means quality components and modern disc players, like Blu-Ray and HD sets. Consider a streaming solution for Netflix, Amazon Prime Instant Video and other services. Internet delivered HD can look as good as packaged media. Ambient light affects image perfection. Plasma, and now OLED, are self illuminating displays and improve in rooms with low light, making them a great choice for movie fans.
SETTING YOUR TV’S
COLOR TEMPERATURE BY GEOFFREY MORRISON
BURIED IN THE PICTURE SETTINGS
on your TV is the Color Temperature control. Flipping through the different presets (often labeled Warm, Low, High, or Cool) can show the quite obvious difference. The trick is, which one is correct? The answer will shock you! OK, maybe just interest you. Color temperature is, to put it simply, the “color” of white. But wait, we hear you ask, isn’t white a mixture of all colors? It is, but the exact amounts of red, green, and blue can vary and still be what we would call “white.” A “warmer” white, for instance, has more red. A “cooler” white has more blue. Obviously this is where the Color Temperature preset name come in. There is, interestingly enough, a “correct” color temperature. The creators of TV shows and movies create a specific “look” for their show/film: The shade of red in a dress, the color of a sunset, the green of the grass. They decide on these colors using special monitors calibrated to an exact color temperature (called “D6500”). If you want to see what the director intended you to see, it’s best to set your TV as close to what their monitors were set. Easier said than done, of course, but setting your color temp is a good first step. Out of the box, your TV is likely set on the Cool setting. This is, compared to “correct,” very blue. In fact, if you switch to the Medium or Warm (also called Low) setting, it’s likely to appear exceedingly red. It actually takes your eyes/brain a few hours or days to adjust to a new color temperature. Try the middle setting on your TV (not Cool/High and not Warm/Low) and leave it there for a few days. Then go look back at Cool; we bet it looks really blue. Because of variations with each TV, we can’t say which setting is closest to accurate. On almost every TV, the middle setting is closer than Cool, and on some, Warm or Low is closest. But on some TVs, Warm/Low is actually too red. Whatever your TV calls that middle setting is the best place to start. If you really want to get it perfect, you’ll need a professional video calibrator, who will come to your house and calibrate your TV to look its best. You can find a local video calibrator at www.ISF.com and www.THX.com.
THE
HIGHS LOWS AND
FUN FACTS ABOUT TV
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OF REFRESH RATE AND WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU
BY GEOFFREY MORRISON
If you’ve recently bought, or are thinking of buying, a new TV, you’ve probably heard about refresh rate and may have wondered what it meant. This number, usually in some multiple of 60 (120, 240, 600, etc.), is an indication of how often the television changes the image on screen. Older televisions refreshed the image 60 times a second (called 60 hertz or “Hz”). While 60 Hz is fine, LED LCD TVs soften detail when there’s motion. As in, anything that moves on the screen (including if the whole image is moving), the detail isn’t as good as when there’s no motion. Higher refresh rates were developed to help combat this. Refreshing the image more often, plus adding some other processing and/or lighting tricks, can almost eliminate motion blur. Not all higher-refresh rates are the same, even if the numbers are. Some companies use the terminology rather loosely, so it’s worth researching ahead of time if the TV you’re considering is actually the refresh it claims. One company’s “240” might be different than another company’s. Many companies are moving away from “Hz” and use some brand-specific terms that include other aspects as well. So a TV with 240 Hz refresh could be a “960 BlahBlahBlah” that incorporates proprietary calculations of what the image looks like when processing and other factors are included. Comparing these is even more difficult. Is Brand A’s “960” better than Brand B’s “480”? On specs alone, there’s no way to tell. Generally, the more expensive models will include an actual higher-refresh panel, plus these other tricks, so they will likely look better. Plasma televisions create an image in a different way than LCDs. As such, their refresh rates, while seemingly much higher (“600 Hz” is one example), aren’t quite the same things as LCD refresh rates. The two can’t be compared. Plasma televisions don’t suffer from motion blur as much as LCDs, and since higher refresh rates are primarily used to minimize motion blur, this inability to compare numbers-to-numbers isn’t too important. The short version? If you’re getting an LED LCD, generally a higher-refresh rate model will look more detailed with motion than a standard, 60 Hz model.
MOST PEOPLE DREA TELEVISION OFTEN M IN COLOR, BUT THOSE THAT GREW DREAM IN BLACK A UP WATCHING BLA ND WHITE. CK AND WHITE RICHARD BELZER A ACTOR, TO APPEAR S JOHN MUNCH IS THE ONLY FICTIONA X-FILES, THE WIRE, ON 10 DIFFERENT TELEVISION SHOW L CHARACTER, PLAYED BY A SINGLE S INCLUDING LAW & AND ARRESTED DEV ORDER: SVU, THE ELOPMENT. THERE IS SOMETHIN HAVE UNREALISTIC G CALLED THE “CSI EFFECT”. BECAU SE EXPECTATIONS OF FORENSIC SCIENCE OF TELEVISION CRIME DRAMAS, JUR O AND INVESTIGATIO N TECHNIQUES. RS This post takes a quick detour from the topics so far (information about several of the choices available to add better sound to your flat screen). In it we discuss “The Numbers Game”: From my last post – “But don’t judge the quality of any system only by its power rating. That’s like judging the quality of a car strictly by the horsepower rating of its engine.” It’s interesting that human nature is such that if we don’t have full knowledge about a product, we look for some defining number that we can use for a quality differentiator. And because it’s a lot harder to educate people than it is to just feed that trait, manufacturers and retailers just market to it. The first example that comes to mind is what’s currently going on with LCD and plasma flat screen TVs. LCDs have a problem when there’s rapid action on the screen, like sports. This action can appear to be “jerky” or stutter which is called motion blur. Manufacturers have reduced the problem somewhat by re-drawing the pictures on the screen at a faster rate. That’s what the numbers you see like 120Hz and 240Hz in regard to LCDs are all about. Plasma screens don’t have this problem. Their refresh rate is inherently almost instantaneous. But because people have become accustomed to looking for such a number when shopping for TVs today, the manufacturers and retailers use the number “600Hz” in their description of plasma sets which is a spec from a circuit in the TV unrelated to motion blur. This is to avoid having a customer ask the salesperson if the plasma set he’s looking at is “120HZ” for example, and having the salesman try to explain that it’s not a factor with plasma sets. Since people are pretty skeptical about the info provided by salespeople in general, it’s just easier to give them a spec for an unrelated circuit in the plasma set and be done with it.
LET’S TALK
I also think the companies selling “LED” TVs are doing the same thing. As of now, there aren’t any LED TVs (OK. Sony showed a prototype at CES this year), they’re LCD screens with LED backlighting instead of fluorescent tubes. But since it’s easy to mislead the unaware, they do it. My point? Be sure to shop where they know what they’re talking about and are willing to take the time to explain it to you. Yes, like Gramophone, for example. And you should be a smart shopper and spend the time and effort to learn a little about what you’re spending your money on so you’ll make smart choices. This ends my rant. For now.
NUMBERS & TVS BY JOEL ROSENBLATT
THANKS FOR READING! let us know your thoughts at info@gramophone.com. 4 w aylesbury rd timonium, md 21093 410.308.1650 8880 mcgaw rd columbia, md 21045 410.381.2100