Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K?

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Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K?

6500K for all
19
66%
9300K for all
6
21%
6500K for American content and 9300K for Japanese content
2
7%
Other (please specify)
2
7%
 
Total votes: 29

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Lawfer
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Lawfer »

Einzelherz wrote:You'll have to explain what a pure white is to me, especially when we're talking about a palette of 54 colors.
Pure white is pure white, meaning it is white without any yellowish, reddish or blueish tint, nor does it present itself accompanied with a greyish, off-white cream gradiant.

However I should mention that while pure white looks very good, it isn't going to be good for the lifespan of your monitor/TV, this is why alot of TVs have safety measures that prevents you from getting pure whites by ways of ABL (Automatic Brightness Limiter) and PWM (Pulse Width Modulation).
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Ikaruga11 »

Lawfer wrote:
Einzelherz wrote:You'll have to explain what a pure white is to me, especially when we're talking about a palette of 54 colors.
Pure white is pure white, meaning it is white without any yellowish, reddish or blueish tint, nor does it present itself accompanied with a greyish, off-white cream gradiant.

However I should mention that while pure white looks very good, it isn't going to be good for the lifespan of your monitor/TV, this is why alot of TVs have safety measures that prevents you from getting pure whites by ways of ABL (Automatic Brightness Limiter) and PWM (Pulse Width Modulation).
Thanks for the input. That's exactly what I was trying to say.

I knew turning brightness and contrast up shortened the lifespan of your display, but I didn't know displaying pure whites also did that. How does that work? I'm really interested now. While I am absolutely obsessed with color accuracy, the lifespan of my monitor is way more important.
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Lawfer
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Lawfer »

GeneraLight wrote:I knew turning brightness and contrast up shortened the lifespan of your display, but I didn't know displaying pure whites also did that.

How does that work? I'm really interested now. While I am absolutely obsessed with color accuracy, the lifespan of my monitor is way more important.
Brightness and Contrast is related to pure whites, lower the contrast and you will see that the whites will start to become accompanied with a greyish tone, while the more you turn up the brightness setting the more light gets emited from the picture. Turn up both and of course, you will have a very nice illuminated looking picture with accurate whites, but it will come at a price (this is why I try to avoid games that repetitively display full screens of pure whites throughout the game), I have no idea how much this will cut from the display lifespan, but it must be quite a bit for display makers to be so hell bent on implementing ABL to CRTs, OLED and Plasmas and PWM to LCDs. Most of these can't even be turned off, I think a few 2017 LG OLEDs did finally implement a setting that can disable ABL, but this sort of thing is pretty rare as in most case you can not disable at all, so you will be stuck with a display with very poor whites.
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Xer Xian
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Xer Xian »

Color temperature is but one of several variables that you must take into account once you want to chase the developer's intent to the fullest extent. For example, there's a high chance that the phosphors of your broadcast monitor won't match those of the old computer monitors (that even predate the sRGB standard) used by devs of the 8-16bit era, and it's the phosphors that ultimately determine the colors you are going to see (here's some detail on different phosphors).

In reality, the developer's intent is impossible to know, and in my opinion videogaming is not a color-critical endeavour anyway. I just use the color temp that I like the most (actually sometimes I don't even bother changing it).
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Lawfer
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Lawfer »

ross wrote:ABL has nothing to do with colour temperature.
ABL limits the amount of luminance that is coming onto the screen, as such this will affect whites and turn them into a more greyish-white color to protect the display.

ross wrote:There's no such thing as 'pure white'.
There is, as GeneralLight explained it comes at the peak of 255 and as I explained most display will circumvent 255 from being displayed. You need the right kind of display and the right settings, in most cases people will have a display and/or settings where whites will be slightly tinted yellow, or red or grey etc It depends on your settings, the display, display technology, display hardware and display software, for example the PC monitor that I am using has ATW Polarizer, however ATW Polarizer gives off a red tint to the screen:

Image

That will affect the whites.

In any case getting pure whites even when possible is not advised because the display will be expending it's lifepspan by working at over capacity to emanate light at the highest scale it possibly can.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Fudoh »

In any case getting pure whites even when possible is not advised because the display will be expending it's lifepspan by working at over capacity to emanate light at the highest scale it possibly can.
every "white" you see has a color temp, since the surrounding light has a color temperature. Artifical light in the evening will make a white sheet of paper look different than sunlight midday. To define white as 255/255/255 RGB doesn't say anything about how it'll will actually look without taking the display into consideration. On better monitors you have a range from about 4000 to 12000°K. And it will still make a huge difference in which kind of ambient light you're looking at the screen.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Ikaruga11 »

Thanks. Displaying pure whites would age the phosphors the fastest and put the most stress on the CRT. I think I'll keep my white balance and colors at a calibrated D65, since it's the NTSC-U standard and apparently doesn't drain the life of a display as fast as D93 does. If I play in a pitch-black room with no ambient light, the dimmer output of the display shouldn't be an issue at all.

Now that I think about it, maximizing white levels by turning up brightness to max would also affect black levels, no? Blacks wouldn't be pure black anymore, but an extremely dark shade of a certain hue. Turning contrast up to max would also make the colors and contrast inaccurate as well.

So to preserve the lifespan of a display and have pure blacks, keep the color temperature at D65 with brightness down to a calibrated level. And keep contrast at a calibrated level to have accurate contrast and colors.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Einzelherz »

Fudoh wrote:
In any case getting pure whites even when possible is not advised because the display will be expending it's lifepspan by working at over capacity to emanate light at the highest scale it possibly can.
every "white" you see has a color temp, since the surrounding light has a color temperature. Artifical light in the evening will make a white sheet of paper look different than sunlight midday. To define white as 255/255/255 RGB doesn't say anything about how it'll will actually look without taking the display into consideration. On better monitors you have a range from about 4000 to 12000°K. And it will still make a huge difference in which kind of ambient light you're looking at the screen.
I was just about to respond with this, specifically the reflective light section. Thanks for beating me to it, Fudoh :)
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by nissling »

GeneraLight wrote:What would be great is if we knew exactly which consoles were developed with which color temperatures.
It would make even more sense if more of these people who claim that 6500° Kelvin gives red tint for gaming also told us about their sets and if they're calibrated. Unless it is calibrated manually with a functional colorimeter, I see no reason whatsoever to care about their statements.

Like I said on the previous page, how many of you have had your sets properly calibrated? You cannot adjust white balance by just using your eyes.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Einzelherz »

I'm speaking from a calibrated position as all of the displays in my house are. The perspective that 6500K looks yellower and 9300K looks bluer is independent from this though as it's just how the spectrum works. It's especially more true when looking at one after 'getting used to' the other.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by nissling »

Yes, I remember speaking with you about ColorMunki at some point. You had an i1D3, right?

Like you say, the human eye can easily adopt to certain light and it "gets used" fairly quickly. This is certainly noticeable when watching silent films that has identical tints for text but uses different tints throughout the film. I.e., if you cut from a blue tint the text will appear brighter and more yellowish than a cut from a red scene, but the text is always the same in terms of colors.

I honestly doubt that games made for consoles with such limited color pallettes like the Nes were designed much different depending on the color temperature of the monitor. And as for someone who feels a strong distaste for 9300° Kelvin, my personal choice is very clear.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by BONKERS »

This is all considering they had their computer monitors and TVs calibrated when making games back then. Which I highly doubt.

I'm sure the TVs were probably set to 9300 by default out of the factory to be sold in Japan. (Whether they hit 9300 is another story).
But I would be surprised if companies developing NES games, which remember only output RF video for the majority of it's lifespan in Japan ever even considered calibrating their TVs and monitors to ensure color accuracy, let alone the rest that comes with calibration.

Later consoles like the PS1 or PS2? Maybe, but I would be surprised considering the common output display medium was composite video.


I have all my displays calibrated with a colorimeter to 6500k, sRGB and either a BT1886 gamma curve, or just shooting for standard 2.2. From display controls or with an ICC profile or both.

I don't worry about it much with my CRT, set by eye as close to 6500k as I can get and if possible a neutral gray scale. And that's good enough.
My CRT doesn't have a red tint, it does suffer from the fabled pushed reds where red just seems to be over driven and has less detail visible. But that doesn't bother me too terribly much.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Lawfer »

Okay I have ran some testings on some japanese games and found that most developers probably just developed their games with whatever user setting preferences each one had.

This results in neither 100% color accuracy in 6500K nor 9300K, some colors are more accurate in 6500K while some are more accurate in 9300k, basically 6500K is too warm in some areas while 9300K is too cold in some other areas, getting 100% accuracy for each game would most likely require specific calibration on a game per game basis.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by FinalBaton »

OP, I think this "what the developpers real intent was" thing regarding colour temperature is fucking about just for the sake of fucking about. Just use whatever looks best. This is a rabbit hole that's pointless IMO
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by tacoguy64 »

I have my crts to 6500k since thats what im used to. Though I do want to calibrate all my monitors to have both a D65 and D93 setting so I could flip back and forth between then to see which one looks nicer. But In all honesty, I'm quite happy with D65.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by FBX »

Did a photograph comparison of my PVM at D93 running my "Smooth" palette versus unmodified NES composite on the same screen. Although the camera had trouble and hyper-focused on the scanlines of the NESRGB feed, it still made for a decent comparison image. The scanline focus caused the colors to appear slightly more muted than they were in reality, but it's not so bad that it made the comparison useless.

Image
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by andykara2003 »

To chime in, as someone with a very limited experience of calibration and at the possible risk of raising eyebrows among those who are much more well versed in this, I can say that if you can get an intuitive feel for what you're trying to achieve, it's possible, with a bit of perseverance and concentration, to tune a display by eye to get absolutely pristine whites.

I only bothered to do this as I was trying to solve the age old and well-discussed problem of the grey, dull looking whites of the RGB modded N64s. This had been bothering me for years, so I took to my Trinitron's service menu and spend some time trying to calibrate the display with the test suite. I couldn't get a satisfactory result.

I usually play in low ambient light in order to preserve my CRTs so I decided to try calibrating the colours by 'feel' in these light conditions. This also rules out the fact that the temperature of even normal levels of ambient light can have a big influence. After documenting the original values and keeping a track of what I was changing and how it was effecting the image, the adjustments became finer and finer until I honed it to a point where single increment in any particular colour was critical.

Anyway the end result was that my N64s are showing the purest whites possible. It's as if a dirty veil has been lifted from the image - the colours are much cleaner. I'm not sure of the argument that you shouldn't have clean whites to preserve your screen. Maybe that's true, but ABL still kicks in if there's a sizable area of white on the screen.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by nakedarthur »

Color temperature has some minor effects on the SMB sky, but the reason some remember it as purple and some as blue is down to the NTSC decoder used in the TV. Sets have much more radical difference in color from the decoder used than color temperature variations. See the Sony CXA2025AS NES palette that replicates a Sony NTSC decoder for comparison. The skies are bold blue, the browns are bright red, it completely changes the color in a fundamental way. Anyway, I think it's in vain trying to match developer intentions when the hardware outputs composite, and every TV model its displayed on is going to look a bit different, no matter how well calibrated it is.
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Lawfer
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Lawfer »

Fudoh wrote:To define white as 255/255/255 RGB doesn't say anything about how it'll will actually look without taking the display into consideration. On better monitors you have a range from about 4000 to 12000°K. And it will still make a huge difference in which kind of ambient light you're looking at the screen.
Thanks and true, though I assume almost everyone here plays in a dark room, no?

GeneraLight wrote:I think I'll keep my white balance and colors at a calibrated D65, since it's the NTSC-U standard and apparently doesn't drain the life of a display as fast as D93 does.
Why don't you test both and see what you like more? Try a colorful 2D game, you'll be able to see how some specific thing's colors diverge between 65K and 93K.

It also seems that some RGB modded consoles such as the SNES (or N64 as andykara2003 mentioned) have a low luminance, so even if a monitor has high color temperature values it won't take as much of a toll on the lifespan of the monitor compared to other consoles, while Dreamcast and Genesis have high luminance in comparison (as Fudoh mentioned to me is closer to arcade luminance).
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Ikaruga11 »

Lawfer wrote:Why don't you test both and see what you like more? Try a colorful 2D game, you'll be able to see how some specific thing's colors diverge between 65K and 93K.

It also seems that some RGB modded consoles such as the SNES (or N64 as andykara2003 mentioned) have a low luminance, so even if a monitor has high color temperature values it won't take as much of a toll on the lifespan of the monitor compared to other consoles, while Dreamcast and Genesis have high luminance in comparison (as Fudoh mentioned to me is closer to arcade luminance).
You mean some consoles output a much brighter image than others?

I can probably calibrate my BVM for both D65 and D93 and store them on different channels for use with different console, thanks to my BKM-14L Auto-Setup Probe which automatically calibrates white balance and color temperature.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by nissling »

I'm actually not so sure if the BKM-14L is an accurate way to get your monitor calibrated. Firstly because it's an automatic process, and calibration is never about automation. Secondly because of the possible wear and tear of the probe. And third, probably most important, is that modern colorimeters and calibration software is probably much more reliable than what you had in the 90s.

I will calibrate two BVMs tomorrow, out of which (a BVM-D24E1WE) have been calibrated with a BKM-14L to D65 very recently. With my equipment I will finally get to see just how this old process actually performs.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Ikaruga11 »

nissling wrote:I'm actually not so sure if the BKM-14L is an accurate way to get your monitor calibrated. Firstly because it's an automatic process, and calibration is never about automation. Secondly because of the possible wear and tear of the probe. And third, probably most important, is that modern colorimeters and calibration software is probably much more reliable than what you had in the 90s.

I will calibrate two BVMs tomorrow, out of which (a BVM-D24E1WE) have been calibrated with a BKM-14L to D65 very recently. With my equipment I will finally get to see just how this old process actually performs.
Phonedork and Savon-pat both use(d) the BKM-14L and said it gives them perfect white balance and color calibration. You can calibrate BVMs manually of course. The probe just makes it easier, faster and more accurate (reproducible).
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Einzelherz »

I look forward to your findings, Nissling. You can't beat a full proper calibration but I'm curious how good the silly probe can do. My 14L5 does a decent job with its auto calibrate when fed color bars, but it still needs tweaking from there.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by nissling »

There is actually no guarantee whatsoever that an automatic "calibration" will be correct. Let me explain this as simple as I can:

A calibration of a display is all about comparing it to a reference, which is usually Rec.601/D65 or Rec.709/D65 in this context (for the BVM-D series, I'd highly recommend sticking to Rec.709). When measuring in CalMAN, you have the option to either measure all the legal values or just a limited selection of it. Now, if you do have experience of this subject (which I do, as I do have both the right knowledge and equipment to get paid for doing this), you ultimately know that you only need to measure a certain amount of values which will help you to keep track but everything you're doing still affects the entirety of the image. Therefore, what you're using to measure the display (software, colorimeter/probe, signal generator etc.) are all tools, what makes the calibration is the person behind it.

For instance, if the BKM-14L measures that the white balance at 0, 30, 50, 80 and 100IRE are all perfect, that by itself doesn't mean that you'll get a perfect greyscale as it doesn't know anything about the entirety. There is also no guarantee whatsoever that the adjustments the probe have kept the gamma curve intact (which is critical for CRT displays) and even if it does find issues, you don't have the control to make compromises as it's all done automatically.

Take a look at this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq_MIbFAxls
I know he's a great photographer, and he surely knows alot about color spaces and image in general, but his way of explaining what a calibration is however is nothing but misleading. He's not even changing any adjustments on the display itself, he just creates ICC profiles with the help of a Spyder5 (which, by the way, is among the worst colorimeters you can get these days) and calls it a day. This is NOT what calibration is about.

The only possible way to get an automatic calibration is with 3D LUTs, but even this method is generally speaking very unreliable by now. The upcoming OLED displays by LG (the 8-series) will have support 3D LUTs which can be generated through AutoCal. It'll be interesting to see how it performs but judging on how previous generations have had major flaws with their calibration tools (both 20 point greyscale and CMS are broken) as well as limited bit depth, I have no intentions to believe that the final result will be preferable over what I can perform on one of those displays with about an hour of tweaking.

Calibration is about the image, not numbers. Since a computer (or any application) can only see the numbers, without knowing the entirety, I see the BKM-14L as a very risky choice. Still I will be able to give you graphs later on today on which we will see how much calibration tools have improved over the past 20 years.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by andykara2003 »

I'll be very interested in your results.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by nissling »

Now I'm done, and will post my results tomorrow. What I can say right now is that those of you who have confidence in your BKM-14L should probably stop reading this thread. No offense, it just doesn't hold up that well anymore...
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by elvis »

nissling wrote:Take a look at this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq_MIbFAxls
I know he's a great photographer, and he surely knows alot about color spaces and image in general, but his way of explaining what a calibration is however is nothing but misleading. He's not even changing any adjustments on the display itself, he just creates ICC profiles with the help of a Spyder5 (which, by the way, is among the worst colorimeters you can get these days) and calls it a day. This is NOT what calibration is about.
He's profiling his monitor with the Spyder. That in turn creates the ICC profiles, and then can be loaded at runtime to adjust the monitor output using the ICC profile as your "diff". This is how you calibrate a modern computer/workstation display where you have access to the software/driver layer of the video card (this is how the VFX studio I work for calibrates 100+ monitors for digital artists - we use Argyll on Linux - https://www.argyllcms.com/ - to generate and load profiles). An ICC profile isn't going to help you for something like a games console or Blu-Ray player, because you've got nowhere to load the profile in, and instead you need to adjust your display to what the device measurement curves report.

As for the Spyder being "amongst the worst", it's a cheap device that gets you to about 95% accuracy on an 8-bit-per-pixel display. Is that good enough? Depends what you're doing. If you're doing basic white point, gamma, and want a profile/adjust done every 30 days (displays drift, and on top of that computers move around and need to be calibrated for environmental reasons) at under 20 minutes for the job, it works great. From there, your doubling in price for every percentage accuracy you want to gain, with almost no upper bounds. Calibrating our digital cinema projector and reference OLED that our professional colourist uses requires a $30,000 device, and I'm sure as shit not going to be giving the junior that to run around and do the hundreds of workstations out on the floor. Only one or two people in the business get to touch that thing.

If you want to calibrate 10-bit-per-pixel displays with true blacks (CRTs, OLEDs, etc), then you're spending 3-10 times the amount on better gear. And again, you can go completely bananas here and buy way more expensive devices if you want.

But again, consider "fit for purpose". A $300 Spyder for calibrating your CRT to play NES is just fine. I have access to very expensive calibration hardware thanks to my job, and I don't even bother. I adjust my various CRTs (including PVMs and BVMs) by eye to the 240p test suite colour bars, as that's good enough for me. It is very easy to get caught up in the pedantry of all of this, but at some point you just have to relax and realise it's just a video game.
nissling wrote:I'd highly recommend sticking to Rec.709
Rec.709 has been superseded by Rec.2020, which in itself has been extended for the wider gamut of UHD displays (which CRTs should be able to handle). But either is fine.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Ikaruga11 »

elvis wrote:But again, consider "fit for purpose". A $300 Spyder for calibrating your CRT to play NES is just fine. I have access to very expensive calibration hardware thanks to my job, and I don't even bother. I adjust my various CRTs (including PVMs and BVMs) by eye to the 240p test suite colour bars, as that's good enough for me. It is very easy to get caught up in the pedantry of all of this, but at some point you just have to relax and realise it's just a video game.
Yeah. I just talked to Savon-pat last night, and he said that while there may be some validity to the BKM-14L being outdated for calibration by today's standards, it won't matter to someone who's just playing video games or watching movies. The difference is not perceptible to the human eye, and 100% color accuracy only matters to professional color purist who needs values to be 100% accurate for reference in their work.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Einzelherz »

Suddenly GL isn't a minmaxer.
GeneraLight wrote: This forum is basically about getting the best possible image quality out of your games.
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Re: Color temperature for games and consoles: 6500K or 9300K

Post by Lord of Pirates »

nissling wrote:There is actually no guarantee whatsoever that an automatic "calibration" will be correct. Let me explain this as simple as I can:

A calibration of a display is all about comparing it to a reference, which is usually Rec.601/D65 or Rec.709/D65 in this context (for the BVM-D series, I'd highly recommend sticking to Rec.709). When measuring in CalMAN, you have the option to either measure all the legal values or just a limited selection of it. Now, if you do have experience of this subject (which I do, as I do have both the right knowledge and equipment to get paid for doing this), you ultimately know that you only need to measure a certain amount of values which will help you to keep track but everything you're doing still affects the entirety of the image. Therefore, what you're using to measure the display (software, colorimeter/probe, signal generator etc.) are all tools, what makes the calibration is the person behind it.

For instance, if the BKM-14L measures that the white balance at 0, 30, 50, 80 and 100IRE are all perfect, that by itself doesn't mean that you'll get a perfect greyscale as it doesn't know anything about the entirety. There is also no guarantee whatsoever that the adjustments the probe have kept the gamma curve intact (which is critical for CRT displays) and even if it does find issues, you don't have the control to make compromises as it's all done automatically.

Take a look at this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq_MIbFAxls
I know he's a great photographer, and he surely knows alot about color spaces and image in general, but his way of explaining what a calibration is however is nothing but misleading. He's not even changing any adjustments on the display itself, he just creates ICC profiles with the help of a Spyder5 (which, by the way, is among the worst colorimeters you can get these days) and calls it a day. This is NOT what calibration is about.

The only possible way to get an automatic calibration is with 3D LUTs, but even this method is generally speaking very unreliable by now. The upcoming OLED displays by LG (the 8-series) will have support 3D LUTs which can be generated through AutoCal. It'll be interesting to see how it performs but judging on how previous generations have had major flaws with their calibration tools (both 20 point greyscale and CMS are broken) as well as limited bit depth, I have no intentions to believe that the final result will be preferable over what I can perform on one of those displays with about an hour of tweaking.

Calibration is about the image, not numbers. Since a computer (or any application) can only see the numbers, without knowing the entirety, I see the BKM-14L as a very risky choice. Still I will be able to give you graphs later on today on which we will see how much calibration tools have improved over the past 20 years.
I'm curious, what are you referencing the BKM against? If you posted it and I missed it I apologize.
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