Colour Brightness

I have long been of the opinion that spec sheets derive their name from the term ‘speculative fiction’ rather than more widely-held belief that they actually contain ‘specifications’. When the spec sheet for battery-powered desktop loudspeakers claims they produce ‘100W PMPO’ and the spec sheet for the reverse-cycle air conditioner in the hallway outside my office claims it produces ‘3.75kW’ of heat while amazingly drawing only 8A (ie. 2kW of power) from the grid, you couldn’t possibly think otherwise. With video projectors now likely to be found in most offices, classrooms and many homes, I suppose we should have known it was time for something new to be added to projector spec sheets to further confuse the purchasing public. Be on the lookout for ‘colour brightness’, the new output measurement based on the work of Karl Lang at Lumita.

Lang, who was trying to find a better method to assess both brightness and colour output, developed his new measure of colour-related brightness for LCD projectors beginning in about 2005. He began promoting the method in 2007, when it was picked up by the 3LCD consortium, a group of LCD projection panel OEMs and projector makers which have banded together to promote products based on LCD technology. The 3LCD group financed Lang’s company Lumita to develop the measurement process and document it in a book entitled International Display Measurement Standard. The next move was to offer this standard to any body that would listen, in the hope that it would be picked up and made a legitimate standard, by a group that didn’t have any money to fund the development of a standard of its own. It found such a body in the Society for Information Display (SID), who anointed this a standard earlier this year.

While this may sound a little Machiavellian (which it most probably is), this tactic is a well-established aspect of the free enterprise version of standards development, and can be found in the standards employed for everything from connectors and cables to wireless protocols, data communications protocols and file formats. If the world adopts your in-house developed product as a standard, then you’ve clearly got the inside running for getting compliant products to market.

In the case of the 3LCD consortium, the reason for promulgating this new brightness measurement was that it rather favours projectors with separate red, green and blue components, such as those with three LCD panels or three DLP micromirror chips, over any design using a single DLP chip and a colour wheel. Because the test involves measuring the projector’s output in the three primary colours of red, green and blue, the bias appears to be even more pronounced when the single DLP projector’s colour wheel has extra colour segments for enhanced pastels or extended colour gamut, two areas where LCD projectors are often considered lacking.