COLUMN ONE

Do Not Adjust Your Set

New and complex high-definition TVs are reviving a 1950s-era practice: house calls by technicians to calibrate for the best picture.

By Alex Pham
Times Staff Writer

March 16, 2005

Hagai Gefen spent thousands of dollars on a home entertainment system, but it wasn't picture perfect.

So he called in Joe Kane, who tunes television pictures the way piano tuners find the perfect pitch of A. Kane and a growing breed of technicians like him rely on their highly trained eyes to coax crisper pictures, richer colors and finer details out of the high-tech television sets anchoring more and more living rooms.

Gone are the days when twiddling the rabbit ears would tease a better picture from the snow on the screen. Although today's high-definition TVs render dazzling, theater-quality pictures, the technology inside has become mind-bogglingly complex. An improperly adjusted set can produce jaundiced, hazy, lifeless images.

Kane and his ilk make it right — for fees that range from $225 to well over $1,000.

"Technology may be at our fingertips, but many people don't know what buttons to press," said Joel Silver, president of the Imaging Science Foundation, an organization founded by Silver and Kane that trains and certifies calibrators.

"The old technology was mature and forgiving," Silver said. "So when a set was badly adjusted, it still looked OK. Now, with high-definition, there's no place to hide."

And because images are viewed and appreciated by human eyes in lighting conditions that can vary dramatically from living room to living room, there's only so much that machines can do to create a picture that's perfect for every home.

"In a completely dark room, I can come up with equations for what colors will always look like to the human eye," said Mark Fairchild, professor of color science and director of the Munsell Color Science Laboratory at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y.

"But in the real world, you have windows, different lighting, different room sizes, and our knowledge of color perception starts to break down. That's where we need a human to come in, look at your TV and tell you why it looks funny."

Human eyes have the ability to discern minute changes in color and light, said Dr. Michael F. Marmor, professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine. "Most people are pretty darn good at detecting fairly fine gradations in color," he said.

Gefen, for instance, knew his TV system, set up in the converted garage of his Woodland Hills home, wasn't right. He just wasn't sure why or how to fix it. But he was confident Kane would be. Gefen, who has a business that makes home theater components, was well aware of Kane's reputation.

"Joe is the master of color," Gefen said as he awaited Kane on a recent Monday afternoon. "He has a very good eye."

Kane, a 56-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair and a courtly demeanor, arrived, lugging a laptop, a light meter and a small black case stuffed with software. His stocky assistant, Marshall Bennett, trailed.

Gefen fired up his $12,000 Samsung front-projection television.

Everyone in the room marveled at the picture quality. Everyone, that is, except Kane.

"It's not very bright," Kane said. "Let's get a reading."

Bennett set up the spectra-radiometer, which measures the light reflected by the 8-foot-wide screen. "Eight foot-lamberts," Bennett called out. It should have been nine.

Among Kane's tools is a DVD that he popped into a computer hooked to the TV. The DVD contains dozens of test patterns, each created to show the flaws of the TV's capabilities. Kane pulled up one called Ramps & Steps. A checkerboard of blacks, grays and whites, it shows whether the contrast is set correctly.

"I'm looking at the entire dynamic range," Kane explained. "If the contrast is too high, like it is now, it removes the details above the white level."

As he ratcheted down the contrast, blocks of bright white suddenly acquired more depth and warmth, so what was once a big, indistinguishable block now is divided into bars of varying shades of white.

And so it went over the next three hours as Kane delved deep into the recesses of Gefen's TV, unearthing its flaws and fixing them one by one. From the brightness to the gray scale, and finally the colors.

Next Kane set his sights on the DVD player, because a TV is only as good as the devices that feed it with images. A calibrator, Kane explained, adjusts not only the TV, but also everything hooked into the TV. Gefen, for example, has a PC and a DVD player.

Gefen popped "Finding Nemo" into the DVD player. While others in the room were quickly drawn into the story of the little clownfish, Kane was driven to distraction by the grays on the screen.

"The gray scale is messy," Kane declared. "It's blurry. The lines are not clear." To demonstrate, he rewound to the title screen. Sure enough, the movie logo had a barely detectable fuzz around the edges of the word "Nemo."

Kane asked the brand of the DVD player.

"It's a Denon," Gefen answered.

"A 3910?" Kane ventured, guessing correctly at the model number. "It probably needs new software. Let's see."

Sure enough, Kane found out that the software was several versions out of date.

"Don't worry. I've got the latest update back at my office," Kane reassured Gefen.

They popped in a DVD of "The Matrix."

Gefen beamed at his TV.

"I think it's much better," Gefen said. "You can really see the difference in a dark scene. Before some of the faces were shaded. After the adjustment, you could see the entire face."

Still, Kane saw problems in the irregular colors on the dark walls in one scene at the beginning of the movie. He shook his head and promised to return with updated software.

Calibrators like Kane are trained to pay attention to conditions outside the set, such as the type of lighting in a room, that can affect the way a TV picture looks.

"Tungsten lights tend to be yellowish," said Fairchild of the Rochester Institute of Technology. "So you have to adjust the white to be a little yellower so the two will neutralize each other. Otherwise, the picture will look bluish."

Then there is the tendency among manufacturers to set their TVs at their maximum brightness, so that their products grab more attention in a crowded retail show floor with bright fluorescent lights.

"Typically, a TV is set up to look good in stores," Fairchild said. "At home, that same set just looks too saturated, too bright and unnatural."

Manufacturers often include two or three predefined settings, such as "movie," which adjusts the set for viewing in a dark room; "dynamic," which has a high sharpness for viewing sports programs; and "brilliant," which is the default setting on most TV sets.

Rotating through these preset modes is relatively easy — some manufacturers such as Sony Corp. even devote a button on their remote controls to doing just that. For the most part, those modes are fine for most consumers, Fairchild said.

"The consumer is the ultimate judge of whether their set looks OK," Fairchild said. "Some people just want the latest plasma and don't care what it looks like. It's a shame, but people also buy expensive cars that they don't know how to drive."

That needn't be the case, said Silver of the Imaging Science Foundation.

"Not everyone gets the same quality out of the same TV set," Silver said. "If you paid thousands of dollars for that set, you want to optimize what you paid for. And that requires a professional person who can set it up so all you have to do is go home and press 'play.' We help you get to the next level of image quality."

That's because doing anything beyond the preset modes requires diving into an underworld of sub-menus with a dizzying array of controls identified by an alphabet soup of letters and numbers, such as "DNIE," "DDP1011" and "CXA2171."

All this adds up to a situation not unlike the 1950s and 1960s, when technicians delivered TV sets to homes and installed them. The job sometimes involved demagnetizing the sets and clambering to rooftops to set up antennas.

Kane earned his way through college — first at Alfred State College in New York, then at the Rochester Institute of Technology — repairing and installing TV sets.

After a 10-year stint as an engineer at Eastman Kodak Co., Kane moved to Los Angeles in 1982 to be closer to the studios that produced the shows that appeared on the TV sets he worked on. He saw cinematographers spend hundreds of hours transferring film into video that could be broadcast to millions of TV sets.

"It became clear to me that display devices are like blank canvases," Kane said. "And if the artist's intent is to be communicated, the canvases all have to be the same. But not all TVs were the same. My job was to close the loop on an ideal mass communication device by making them look as close as possible to the original."

Kane tried to do this in two ways — by persuading TV manufacturers to build their sets according to standards set by the National Television System Committee, an organization that sets technical standards for TVs, and by training other calibrators.

"I can't tune each of the 25 million TV sets that gets sold each year, so I try to tell others how to do it," Kane said.

Kane's work in promoting calibration has garnered the appreciation of cinematographers.

"When someone takes the time to calibrate their TV set, they're more likely to see the full potential of the images that the filmmakers have put into that picture," said Allen Daviau, a cinematographer who has worked on films such as "Bugsy," "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," "The Color Purple" and "Van Helsing."

As an example, Daviau points to the opening scene of "Van Helsing." The images are black and white, an homage to horror films of the 1930s and 1940s. A TV set that's set too brightly will display the nuances in the dark areas of the movie, he said.

"You won't get the mystery of the shadows," Daviau said. "The way you get impact is by using the full contrast range to guide the eye. Some things you want coming right at the audience. Other things, you want to hide until the right moment, when you reveal it. It can be something as simple as somebody walking out of the dark into the light. We want to find the right moment and guide the audience's eye. We achieve this through a choreography of light and shadow."

In movie theaters, the environment is strictly controlled for optimum viewing. There are no bright windows. The walls, even the seats, are dark so there's no glare on the screen. Aside from the exit signs and the dim illumination of the aisles, all lights are turned off. That makes calibration a far easier exercise, even though the same basic steps are taken to gauge a projector's picture quality.

A calibrator of home TVs, however, has to tweak their settings to accommodate a host of imperfect viewing environments.

"That's where the art comes in," Kane said.

Over the years, Kane has trained dozens of calibrators, including David Abrams, an amiable 23-year-old who works for Kane as a project coordinator when he's not calibrating sets.

Abrams enrolled in the Imaging Science Foundation's 18-hour course right after high school. Like Kane, he paid his way through college tuning TVs, making as much as $1,000 in one weekend.

Freelance calibrators can gross as much as $140,000 a year working six days a week, Abrams estimated, although he's no longer calibrating full time. The foundation estimates there are close to 3,000 certified calibrators in the U.S., about 95% of whom are men.

The vast majority of Abrams' clients are middle-class video enthusiasts. That's a big shift from when Abrams started out.

"Five years ago, most of my clients were dealers who were installing $500,000 systems," Abrams said. "We saw the shift towards mass market a few years ago when prices started coming down for HDTVs. Now, we're starting to see the Circuit City and Best Buy crowd."

That has ramped up demand for calibrators, said Silver of the foundation, which offers two courses a month.

"Our classes are filling up months in advance," he said. "But we can't offer more because I can't get calibrators to teach them. They're all too busy working."

What sets calibrators apart from average TV viewers is not just the 18-hour course, but their experienced eyes. "It may well be that practice is what makes perfect," said Stanford's Marmor.

Kane agreed, saying his eyesight wasn't particularly special.

What sets good calibrators apart, Kane said, is experience and an understanding that it is "always about the art. It's about creating a canvas for people to be able to tell their stories."