Suntan
Well-known member
That?s just it. My desktop display is setup to mimic the look of Endura print paper. Which does not and cannot look just like the real world. The desire is to have confidence that what is created on screen will faithfully be recreated when printed. But the more important aspect of it is that if you were to sit down and watch a movie on the display, or even worse, play a video game on the display you would think it was a cheap piece of crap because the colors would look dull and not ?lifelike? the way you are used to seeing them when you game or watch a movie.
More importantly, that?s just one use case and it costs a lot of money just to get that. So if all you wanted the display for was to watch movies on it, you would think it was a POS that cost way too much, and you?d be right.
Do you use your phone for just one thing and one thing only? Or do you expect it to be a jack of all trades?
It may seem silly to press the point, but I?ll give a real example. When I got my Droid 3 I really liked the pentile screen because it used a ?white? pixel as the extra pixel, allowing the screen to be nice and bright without draining the battery. At the time my day job required me to take notes while out in the bright sun quite often during the summer. Being able to use the phone to take pictures, embed them into a quickoffice document and then put notes with the pictures for further review back at the office was great and was actually feasible because the screen was nice and bright and the black text on a white background was really sharp and clear. I could use it all day with the backlight maxed, taking pictures and making notes and not be too worried about the battery going out.
At the time it was the ideal screen for the job, yet some people here would like to tell me that it was my own ?blissful ignorance? that I didn?t know I should want a traditional RGB array screen instead.
Now let?s talk about after hours, the screen worked ok for video, although the pentile matrix could be annoying from time to time. It was rather drab for games where I much prefer brighter and punchier colors and amoled would have been a benefit back there. No need to try and mimic ?real life? when I?m slingshotting birds at green pigs?
Was I ?blissfully ignorant? about movie playback and lack of saturated colors for games? Heck no, I could see it plain as day. But the reality is that you?re stuck making subjective choices about what will best fit your needs and nobody is making the ?perfect? screen.
Not really. Most of the time the goal is to produce an image the way the photographer wants to portray it to the viewer. First and foremost, don?t let me break it to you that those girls weren?t made to look that way by their momma. Don?t believe me? Have a mouse-over on some of these girls.
Portrait Professional Picture Gallery
"That doesn?t count," you say. But it does. The reality is that we have been conditionally trained to expect what we see on a display to look different from what we see in real life.
If I take an image of some kids playing in a school gymnasium, do you really want the resulting image to look a sickly greenish-yellow from the sodium vapor lights? Or do you want them to look ?normal?? When you are at the gym yourself your eye/mind automatically corrects for the whitepoint of the lights. When you see the result that would be a faithful representation of the lighting in a picture you would think it looks terrible.
Now you may be thinking, well yeah that?s obvious, but that is just one example (one that most people can relate to) of many things that have to change to make a ?picture? look normal, whether it is printed or displayed on a screen. And that doesn?t even touch on all the lighting and color change tricks that can and do get used to shift the resulting images (both video and stills) so that they end up looking like what you expect them to look like on your display.
If you still don?t believe me, have a google for terms like ?CSI Miami colors? or ?Michael Bay Colors? those are two off the top of my head that are usually the most obvious and complained about, but there are entire classes taught about changing colors to fit something other than ?real life.? Usually the effect is to try and make the new video mimic the limitations and constraints of old film, because that?s what we want our movies to look like. Google for something like ?cinestyle color correction? and you should probably find a lot of hits.
Yes, there are standards based on the specific industry you are in, and yes I do agree that 6500K is the generally agreed upon reference for ?daylight.? Where I disagree is that everyone has to like ?daylight? as their absolute preferred reference and strive to only use or own displays that only output such.
Just check the menu of your regular desktop monitor. I bet it has a number of different settings for ?warm? or ?cool? or perhaps it just gives color temps like 5500K and 6500K and maybe 7000K. The reality is that some people like to look at the warmer colors if they are doing text work on their computer screens all day. Are they ?imperfect? for wanting this?
Or for that matter, type ?White paint? into the search field of the Home Depot website and see how many hits you come up with. Are all but one of those imperfect choices?
Not really. We?re actually the other way around. The good folks at SMPTE and THX have put a fair amount of work into figuring out the human eye. Basically they suggest that for someone with 20/20 vision (?but of course all of us here are better than average?) their eye can resolve about 1/60 of a degree of arc. Beyond that, it doesn?t matter. Based on this, and some other things, they have standards for movie viewing. Now we use our phones for more than just movies, but it is interesting to take a look at the numbers. Basically, for a 4.8? screen with a 1280x720 res; the ideal distance someone should hold their phone to maximize acuity without having the individual pixels too obvious a person should hold the phone pretty much at 11.2? from their eyes. Which I would say that is on the close side of where someone would normally hold their phone. So we?re pretty much there already for resolution.
As for color, here is the color gamut for sRGB.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Gamut-sRGB.png/600px-Gamut-sRGB.png
The triangle in the middle is the sRGB colorspace (which is a pretty small colorspace compared to some of the other prominent ones) and the swoopy triangle like envelop around it represents what the average human eye can make out. As you can see, sRGB isn?t even hitting half of all the colors that we can see. And no phone display is even coming close to accurately filling the whole sRGB gamut.
If anything, displays need to get going on color if we ever want them to replicate ?real life.? But as we discussed above, people have been conditioned to expect our displays to show use something other than ?real life? and so when we see displays that show a lot of vibrant colors (like amoled) we instantly point a finger and denounce it for having ?amped up? colors that are ?realistic.?
They have difficulty with 6500K ?daylight.?
Can be measured to determine which display meets a subjective set of criteria for which we can choose to agree looks ?better.? There?s a difference.
-Suntan
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