After talking with manufacturers of panels like eCinema Systems, Cinetal, and Panasonic, it seems like all the panels have basically the same hardware. The big manufacturers like NEC and LG setup a factory line and then produce literally thousands of screens over the course of 6 months. Then, they shut it down, and reset it for the next panel.

The main difference between a model from Cinetal or anyone else who uses the same panel from NEC, is the backlighting and digital processing software built-in to the screen. So, if a screen has the ability to display a choice of 16 million colors, then the big difference is how it chooses what colors to display, and how it deals with lighting for getting the best quality blacks and whites.

The human eye can resolve about 10 million colors and 530 billion steps of gradations, but, the best monitors out there can only resolve about 1 billion steps of gradation. A printed image or film slide can map more than 530 billion.

So, how do you decide what colors we want to show on the display?

This is where the magic of the monitor’s software comes in handy. It makes a display more versatile for mapping a set of colors from an image to the closest set of colors the display can actually show. All a Lookup Table is, is a set of numbers that map one possible color to another. So, if I have autumn stone cherry red, but the display can only resolve a candy cherry red, then the display can map the color to the closest representation we want.

But, the fun doesn’t stop there. If you know that you will go to a print, and that some other processing may be done down the line for a print to give it a “scary movie” look, then you could add another lookup table that then gives it a dark de-saturated look that more closely represents what your final print will look like.

So, it can be used for correcting the display, and creatively altering the overall look to give a style to the overall image.

For client viewing at Bling Imaging, we’ve found the best displays to give many gradations and an excellent balance of contrast are Plasma displays. By adding a Cinetal Davio, or an HD Link Pro from Blackmagic Design to a Panasonic Pro Plasma Broadcast Monitor we can upload 3D LUTs to process the color before the the output to the display.

There is no one master solution, though, it really depends upon what monitor gives you best results in your viewing environment. That said, having the ability to add display LUTs is a major advantage.

If look carefully at both images, which one looks like it is evenly going from black to white?

The one with gamma correction, right?

But, here’s the trick. the values in the gradient from the image without gamma correction is in fact going from 0 to 100% evenly. That’s right, the human eye sees 18% gray as the middle on the road, due to the way our eyes perceive light. So, as an enhanced feature for us humans, monitors and all sorts of devices come preset with the brightness of the screen adjusted with a curve that leaves the blacks and whites at the same place, but pushes the middle grays out to the center of the spectrum.

This curve is called a logarithmic curve in math. The gamma value that you usually see is 2.2 that is common in video and most monitors and operating systems. This refers to the logarthmic value of the curve.

So, we can push and pull the curve to decide where we want the exact “middle gray” to be.

This is great for viewing images on a monitor, however, it can be problematic if you are doing picture manipulation. For example, if you take a middle gray value at 18%, and add it to another middle gray value of 18%, what should the gray value be? Well, if it is not gamma corrected, then 18% + 18% will give you 36%. However, if it is gamma corrected, then 18 + 18% will give you equivalent of 100% because 18% is in the middle and the middle + middle takes you right to the edge!

So, gamma correction is best when we’re viewing the picture, but not necessarily when we’re doing the math to adjust colors or compositing multiple pictures together over each other.