ONE INSTALLER'S OPINION 

COLOR SPACE.........

 ............the New Distortion                  

It's always something. Can't really say when it started. For me, it may have been about three weeks after I purchased my then top-of-the-line Pioneer DV-09 DVD player. I thought it rendered the best images I had ever seen or would likely see in my home for several years, but apparently I was wrong. Page-One splashes in all the mags insisted that I buy a new box that had PROGRESSIVELY scanned images......then it had to go for one that had a more favorable black offset (0IRE vs. 7.5IRE)......then it had to be swapped for one that had an HDMI connection......then IT had to go for not ONE, but TWO new higher definition players because, it turned out, we were in the middle of a format war and studios were taking sides and, well, I couldn't miss any releases, you know......then the surviving player had to have an HDMI connection with a higher number suffix, then...... 

Every box in our collective systems has undergone a similar rapid-fire metamorphous. No functionality has been spared. It continues to happen with all forms of media players, receivers, video processors, front projectors, projection screens, all flat panel technologies, remote controls and, almost inexplicably, loudspeakers (how many ways can a cone move air?). Many of these innovations have been legitimate and provided improved functionality. A few have not. Some have been born from a convenient transition to the digital age, while others stem from a creative marketing team with less to do than Bruce Willis' hairdresser. 

Still, this constant technoshuffle is a sign of the times and can be trumped on most days by a similar industry, home (and laptop) computing. Your new CPU is most likely obsolete before you can get it out of the box and call up your first E-Bay screen. Likewise, I always counsel new clients that by the time the equipment is ordered, installed and calibrated, one or more boxes in the rack may be considered "archived". 

Please don't read this as a complaint. I am generally the first one in line. It's what keeps this avocation interesting and exciting, if not inexpensive. In relatively few years we have taken Home Theatre from a VCR connected to a 19" Magnavox via a molded red, white and yellow cable to an experience that can routinely beat a commercial theatre without securing a second mortgage. Still, every now and then, one must pause and say "Wait a minute......" 

Let's take the case of the latest marketing battlefield, COLORSPACE...... 

Colorspace, a.k.a. color gamut, students of the Science will recall, is the included space in a triangle drawn on a C.I.E. chromaticity chart, where the vertices of the triangle are the points (x,y coordinates) represented by red, green and blue. Most product reviews show two triangles - the one that should be, and the one that is. The one that SHOULD BE can take on two flavors in the U.S. One, the correct triangle for all content mastered in the NTSC format and two, a slightly larger triangle for content mastered in the post Digital Transition to the ATSC format. At the ISF, we like to call the latter "a bigger box of crayons" with which directors and cinematographers can ply their Art. Obvious point being, if one wants to see the directors art, they should watch movies, prime time TV, sporting events, etc. with the same triangle (color space) that they were created in - anything else will result in a distortion as egregious as a 15,000 Kelvin blue screen or a 20% harmonic distortion on a pure audio note. So when you pick up nearly any current advertisement for a video display and the manufacturer is trumpeting "We bring you 30% more color" they are really saying, "We have pushed out red, green and blue to give you an absurdly large triangle that will over-saturate everything you watch and bears no resemblance to what the cinematographer had in mind - but we think it might catch your eye on the showroom floor"......and indeed it might, which takes me to the final point I'd like to make regarding Kodachrome marketing. 

Like so many things in video, the point is best illustrated with an audio analogy. Gray haired readers who can remember record turntables will likely remember the really good ones that had marks on the side of the platter and a little stroboscope light which allowed the user to adjust the speed to be precisely 33 1/3 rpm, the STANDARD for one vinyl format. If I set the turntable speed to 38 rpm because I wanted to put some zip in "Bolero", nobody got hurt. No patents were infringed upon, no Federal laws broken. What I was listening to was certainly NOT ACCURATE, and indeed may have caused Ravel to turn over in his grave, but so long as it pleased ME (and any other consenting adults in the room), ...what the hay! 

I have come to take a somewhat similar position with video......... 

Most people who spend Big Bucks on their Home Theatre do so in part because they very much want to see the director's Art. Distortions, or artifacts as we call them, are to be chased down and eliminated at (nearly) all costs. "Hot" colors, oversaturated by 30% are blasphemous!  

But here's the thing...... 

If Aunt Martha wants to watch the Food Channel in a color space larger that Texas, so be it. If you think full length animation features look better way more saturated than what Pixar had in mind - go for it! Just know that these renderings could be a light-year from the "original Art". 

I was fortunate to attend a technical gathering with Joel Silver about a month ago where we got to preview a display device that had an extraordinary color gamut - safe-to-say larger than anything else we had seen before. Joel's description of the look was - "Seductive" ... and I couldn't disagree with him. Thankfully the manufacturer had provided a safety net for this huge distortion relative to conventional standards. They essentially implemented a "Gamut" menu pull-down tab that let the user select from many size triangles like Rec. 601 (NTSC), Rec 709 (ATSC), EBU (European standard), Adobe (CMYK standard), DCI (Digital Cinema Initiative) and, sigh, the XXXL "Native". All of these triangles, except Native, are legitimate, of course, and indeed ARE the standards for their respective applications. So I guess as long as I can get back to "Accurate" at the push of a button, I'm willing to be "seduced" from time to time......T