On Mon, 9 Apr 2001 07:47:45 -0400, "Steve Sakellarios" wrote:

>Man, am I glad you brought this up! I posted something about this issue
>awhile back and nobody responded. I have been having the opposite
>problem--apparently I was running my monitor darker than most people, and on
>other computers my images were looking washed out.
>
>I used to run master control for a small television station, and there was
>an issue then, too--bars, etc. notwithstanding. Even my preview and air
>monitors didn't exactly match. I ended up going to a Circuit City, and
>getting permission to tune about 8 sets to a show I normally recorded for
>the station to see if it looked right or not on average.
>
>When you're dealing with scan/cropping issues, i.e. that different monitors
>crop off different edges of an image, you use a "safe area". I think because
>there's no reliable or consistent standard of computer monitor calibration
>that I know of, you have to apply the same principle.
>
>The first step is to go through your computer monitor gama procedures to get
>your monitor as close to "normal" as you can.
>
>Then, my idea is to view movie trailers on your computer. If the video I
>produce for the internet looks about the same contrast and brightness as
>commercially-produced movie trailers, then I figure I'm in the ballpark.
>
>Finally, you could include some kind of notice like some people use for
>tracking adjustment, "computer monitor settings vary. If this video looks
>too dark or bright, please adjust your monitor accordingly". That's a
>judgement call. Most people just accept whatever quality they are viewing as
>though it came from God and are too lazy to change it. I lived upstairs from
>some people who kept the chroma on their television cranked to the max,
>everything bled like crazy, and they never adjusted it. They just accepted
>it as a "bad tv" I guess and got used to it.

You think the issue is bad for TV - try web page design that
uses a lot of photos and text pages with something other
than dark text on white backgrounds!!! Drove me nuts finding
a standard, until I realized there WAS NO STANDARD - had to
make my own! (I had tried monitor normalizing procedures
[somewhat like the color-bars for TV] with little real
success.) Went to a lot of good photographers' sites and
adjusted my monitors for best average "playback" of their
work, then adjusted my work to match, adding "extra-dark
blacks" and "extra-white whites" to have some hope of
"readability" on non-standard monitors. Then I ask a variety
of people with a range of browsers and platforms to look
at samples and respond (pretty much what you did), and
made corrections to accomodate non-standard monitors - and
even then, I still got feedback recently from a member
of an overseeing board on a site that has been up a year
that "it's too dark and hard to read"...!!! ;-)
Aaaaarrrrggggh!!!! ;-) I suggested he adjust his monitor
to be more "normal"...;-) As for TV, I go through the
range of broadcast material and set up a good average
for that, then adjust my computer monitors and editing TVs
for closest-match (being aware of color casts, painfully
evident with B&W material...). BTW, one of these is a
20" VEGA with "S" input (one of the rare ones with few
convergeance and distortion problems [I bought the
demo off the display rack, the only way to get a good
one...;-], and got best picture with the sharpening circuit
turned off, in "standard" mode, with almost everything else
turned down a bit. I find my videos look OK on most
TVs now - but it is frustrating that the time and energy
spent doing careful contrast-gamma/brightness/color-balance/
color-saturation/sharpness adjustments to footage during
editing is often lost on TVs carelessly set up...
(Their loss, not mine, I guess, since I can see it in
all its true glory...! ;-) As you say, it is amazing what
some people view as "normal", without attempting to
adjust it for better results... (I once adjusted my
sister's TV from bright/flat/no-blacks to a nice, rich
picture with good brilliance/tone/color - and she was
annoyed and wanted it back the way it was! ;-)
Ah, well...;-)