Why do you benefit from color calibration?

It is a fact that as the cost of business and end user display technologies is forced lower and lower, there have to be cuts made somewhere to remain competitive. Many years ago, units were engineered with low tolerance parts and meticulously aligned by technicians before even leaving the factory.



now, the demand placed on manufacturers for quantity, cost, and volume dictates that as an overall whole, they use more generic parts of slightly lower tolerance. Advanced electronic circuitry is relatively good at automatically compensating for these varied parts and allows a large volume of units to be manufactured without needing a lot of manual adjustments and tweaks.



Depending on your specific requirements, "pretty close" color reproduction may be all that is ever required and your display can certainly provide an adequate level of performance right out of the box.



You need to seriously think about color calibration in the following cases:

• Projected/Displayed material must match colors of printed content (logos, graphics, etc)

• Two images are beside each other or in close proximity showing similar content

• Color range is desired to distinguish data sets (seismic, strip logs, geographical data)

Color perception by the human eye is a complex topic containing a lot of physics and biology. To save some time, I will summarize by saying the following: The human eye’s reaction to the color spectrum is not precise enough to record quantifiable measurements. You can tell something is "blue" but just how "blue" is it? To top that, different people will have different perceptions of certain colors.



So who is right? The ONLY way to be certain that your colors are being properly shown is to have your display calibrated using special test gear that will quantifiably measure color. This involves using a special colorimeter unit that takes output readings of a known source fed into your display or projector. With this information, we can tweak some advanced settings that control color reproduction on your display/projector to enable it to output a balanced spread of colors across the spectrum.



Believe it or not, the white balance is a large indicator of how color reproduction is balanced between two displays. This is the ability of the device to reproduce varying shades of gray from black to white. Again, this is a very subjective measurement by the eye and requires the aforementioned colorimeter to properly measure.



As you can see, Color calibration is a highly skilled task that is best left to the professionals. Contact Engineered AV for Calgary Audio Visual to request a consultation on how we can help you improve your image.