Leitner's Cinematography Corner

A battery of flatpanel TVs, looking very much the same, at J&R in lower Manhattan.
Photo by D.W. Leitner

In Cinematography Corner #4, “Screens large and small,� I wrote about the centrality of scale to classic Cinema and, conversely, the recent adoption of the A/153 ATSC Mobile DTV Standard, poised to usher in an era of wallet-sized TVs.

Similar thoughts regarding screen size and digital wizardry filled my head as I helped a close friend shop for a large flat-screen TV in the run-up to Christmas.

In a basement showroom at J&R, a large electronics emporium in lower Manhattan, we stood mesmerized in the glow of dozens and dozens of large fluorescing LCDs, tiled across walls, along aisles, in every visible direction.

All the usual Japanese and Korean suspects were there: Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, JVC, Toshiba, Coby, Vizio, LG, and Samsung.

Shoppers who are not video pros can have a hard time differentiating between the merits of competing flatscreens this holiday season.
Photo by D.W. Leitner

To the credit of J&R, the dozens and dozens of sets on display—all showing the same feed: a pair of chirpy, coiffed local news mannequins demonstrating a kitchen tip for the holidays—matched closely in hue, brightness, and saturation.

Not like the bad old days of Circuit City when no two showroom TVs reproduced the same color or contrast, and store “help� mostly didn’t (you were always more knowledgeable than they were).

Back in the day—like, two years ago—a typical TV showroom featured bulky CRT and DLP rear-screen models as well as conventional CRTs and flatpanels such as LCDs and plasmas.

Contrast-challenged rear-screen consoles in particular needed all the showroom tricks they could get. So store TVs were demonstrated using picture menu settings with names like “Vivid� and “Dynamic� that amped up saturation and edge sharpness, all the better to make your eyes salivate and your credit card go swipe. (Don’t kid yourself; what images are supposed to look like by their makers is not a prime consideration in selling TVs.)

The good news this holiday season: it’s emphatically clear that flatscreens, with their superior image geometry, pixel detail, and stable colorimetry, have won out.

Moreover, while Panasonic and the Chinese ramp up manufacture of plasma panels—LG, Pioneer, and others still market plasma TVs but have abandoned plasma manufacturing—LCDs rule this year. (Next season it could be ultrathin, low-power, LED-driven LCDs, still pricey but poised to explode in popularity.)

Today’s LCDs are increasingly full-HD and 1080p too—a perfect match to inexpensive Blu-ray players now flooding the market. (The New York Times reported a few weeks ago that household penetration of Blu-ray players has outpaced that of DVD players for the same period since introduction, until now the most successful consumer technology introduction ever.)

This welcome turn towards solid-state, digital display technology means showroom TVs, properly set up, now exhibit image uniformity and fidelity to a degree previously impossible. My close friend, with whom I was shopping for a flatscreen TV, was flummoxed. How to decide between them?

Differentiators this season are mainly size (diagonally measured) and furniture design (size and shape of the black bezeled frame—yes, all of them are shiny black).

To stand out, some flatscreen lines are tricked out a bit. Sony’s top-shelf Bravia series boasts a 240Hz refresh instead of the usual 120Hz—smoother motion reproduction is claimed—a trend others are climbing aboard.

What does any of this have to do with cinematography?

Years ago, I used to demonstrate an essential difference between film and video by holding side-by-side strips of 35mm print film and 1in. videotape. I’d ask the audience, “Where’s the color?”

Everyone could see color in the 35mm print film. The strip of videotape, however, appeared dark brown or black, depending on which way it wafted.

My point: In electronic motion image capture and reproduction, color is inherent to the display device, not the recording medium. The final “look,� therefore, is determined by display technology as much as by camera technology. This is an uncomfortable reality rarely addressed openly. What cinematographer wants to embrace the implications?

Motion picture screens are passive. They’re matte white, or in the case of RealD 3D screens showing James Cameron’s holiday blockbuster, Avatar, they’re silver, for higher reflectivity. Whichever the case, they don’t contribute to sharpness, hue, or saturation. They merely reflect images thrown upon them.

Needless to say, when I walk into a consumer TV showroom and see a battery of disparate screens all showing remarkably similar images, the cinematographer in me breathes more easily.

We haven’t reached the promised land of perfectly calibrated consumer displays, but we’re getting closer, in this the season of hope.

Happy Holidays!

P.S. My friend chose a 46in. Samsung LED.