Which color temperature?

[FabriZed]

Hello, I have a trivial question, nonetheless important from my point of view. Which color temp. must "old" games (and those of nowadays, for that matter) be played on a modern tv set, considering displays usually sport a circa 9300K "cool" and a circa 6500K "warm" setting?
When I made the transition from my old crt to a newer lcd (and now to a plasma) I found the "cool" setting to be the most faithful, as games appeared the same I always had seen them (with the obvious differences due to the tech). Furthermore the "cool" setting seems to match better what I remember arcade games to look, but here I may be in gross error.
My old crt was a full analog philips I used starting with the Snes, connected in scart rgb and hadn't got a temp. setting.

[Fudoh]

If you find your games looking good with a neutral or cool color temp setting on your LCD, then your CRTs have never been set properly. Of course nobody in the arcade biz ever cared for setting monitors to anything "standard", but if you would have had a properly calibrated TV set back in the days, warm would be the only setting looking acceptable for you nowadays - no matter if you're using a CRT or a LCD or Plasma set.

[FabriZed]

Thank you very much. I have high regard of your opinion, I will definitely retry to get accustomed to warm, at this point. Fact is in some games warm looks spot on and pleasing from the start, in other games I really have a hard time at it (I immediately think to shinobi PS2, which has a pretty strong dominant tint in every stages, the pictures change dramatically changing c.temp.)

[Ed Oscuro]

I can't see what you're seeing, but from what's being described I will have to disagree with Fudoh's advice, because he is ignoring the most critical factor to setting color temperature.

The appropriate color temperature for a LCD monitor is mostly determined by the ambient lighting. What CRT televisions did or didn't do is not relevant to you when making this choice now. What is relevant (and may have changed since the CRT days) is what kind of lighting you have.

Trying to force yourself to get accustomed to a mismatch between the color temperature of your monitor and the ambient lighting is a bad idea. If ambient lighting is provided by the sun, your ambient lighting will be closer to 9300K and therefore the display will look best at a color temperature closer to that. If a person has incandescent lights or "warm" CFL or LED bulbs, then a warm setting will probably look OK. I have noticed this multiple times when switching lighting technology (from incandescent to CFL and then to LED) or when moving a monitor from a CFL to a spot next to a window.

So my advice would be to trust your eyes when it comes to this. If you can, you might want to check out some kind of online LCD test suite (like this one) to check your monitor against, but it won't override your tendency to match the panel and ambient lighting types.

If there is a mismatch, should you try to adjust the ambient lighting (not always possible, i.e. with windows providing ambient daylight) or the display? That would be a hard question to answer. There is a big discussion to be had about what's "best" - "cool" bulbs closer to 9300K, or "warm" bulbs closer to 6500K. For a computer monitor, I am happy with these but the packaging would suggest they are far off the scale, which isn't exactly true. I am mostly going to ignore this for now, because it's relatively easy to find what makes the room look best and you should be setting your monitor in response to that. You can have other considerations when selecting ambient lighting, but it is true that you sometimes should select ambient light to match your monitor's use - shorter-wavelength, high color temperature sources closer to 9300K than 6500K will show fine details a bit better. But that wasn't enough to get me to ditch the "warmer" bulbs and a warmer setting for my monitor; when I tried it out, the ambience felt wrong.

[FabriZed]

Interesting info. Anyway, after further investigation, from some technical sources it appears that my feeling of old games to be "right" at 9300K white point may not be wrong, at least until some (recent) point when industry switched to hdtv standards. Japanese NTSC apparently used a 9300K standard after all, as was true for consumer TVs in the USA. I also found sources that state a 9300K standard for arcade monitors. This would match my feelings and my memories of how arcade games looked.
I admit you have a point Fudoh, when you say probably no one ever cared calibrating arcade monitor, but honestly I think that first party delivered coin-ops such as Sega cabinets did have a factory calibration of sort (they used high standard sets for the time). In fact, for example, I remember pretty clearly Virtua Fighter 2 title screen to be a bright cold white and not a warm one (but still, I may not rembember correctly who knows)

Give a look at these discussions, for example:

http://www.eizo.com/na/library/basics/c ... index.html
http://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads. ... ea6062aeab
http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php? ... w=previous

[ryu]

tvs and monitors were often shipped with their colour temp set to 9300K not because that was the (graphics) industry standard, but because a cold picture appears superior over a warm picture to someone without knowledge on the subject. it's marketing! the graphcis industry standard has been 6500K for who knows how long. i've got a crt with adjustable colour temp and 9300K has never, ever looked right to me. normally setting the colour temp to cold will create even more of a tinted look.

if you feel like a warm picture has more of a tint than a cold picture, it's probably the ambient lighting messing your picture up like ed oscuro suggested.

[cools]

I'm curious about this. Arcade monitors let you alter RGB levels independently, and I've always been under the impression that the ideal setup was to maintain a pure black level and alter each colour independently so that on a colour bar each step has matching brightness - the highest level pushed as bright as possible without bleeding and while maintaining distinction from the next. Anyone that's seen a monitor I've messed about with has commented on how much it's improved This produces a very clean, brilliant white.

How does this fit with colour temperature? Is it recommended to push RG or B slightly higher?

[ryu]

I'm curious about this. Arcade monitors let you alter RGB levels independently, and I've always been under the impression that the ideal setup was to maintain a pure black level and alter each colour independently so that on a colour bar each step has matching brightness - the highest level pushed as bright as possible without bleeding and while maintaining distinction from the next. Anyone that's seen a monitor I've messed about with has commented on how much it's improved This produces a very clean, brilliant white.

How does this fit with colour temperature? Is it recommended to push RG or B slightly higher?

what you're doing is correct, but whites and greys also need to be pure. if you've got a cold colour temp the whites would become a bit blueish if i'm not mistaken, so you would increase the blue gain for that.

[Ed Oscuro]

I'm curious about this. Arcade monitors let you alter RGB levels independently, and I've always been under the impression that the ideal setup was to maintain a pure black level and alter each colour independently so that on a colour bar each step has matching brightness - the highest level pushed as bright as possible

You mean matching gamma for the R, G, and B channels? That would seem to work, but I've noticed (just fooling around with my LCD monitor until I shell out for a calibrator) that trying to match gamma (on my panel it's labeled "color gain" apparently) can lead the gamma color stripes to synchronize, but at the cost of a tint in the picture. Can't say much more about that without experience.

Pushing the brightness as high as possible (I don't know what you mean by "the highest level"), for the whole tube, doesn't seem like a good idea because it's going to reduce the lifespan, and it's quite easy to make a tube too bright. One of the marketing points DataColor has for their stripped-down TV version of a calibration device is that it can extend set lifespan by preventing tubes from being overdriven. Pushing brightness too far will also increase the rapidity with which the color calibration will drift. It seems like the common wisdom that this is something to avoid.

[cools]

By brightness I mean getting the white as birght as it can be without causing bleeding of any colours nor making the contrast artificiially high (colour bars for say, a CPS2 game all being distinct, not the one below max being the same as max)