you had to ask didnt you
mmm it depends, where they are gonna be?
the ideal for any home theater would be:
colors of walls and objects facing the monitor (that means the walls at the sides, the one behind your back, and the roof, and the floor) (just making sure we're properly oriented here
) should be black so no light reflects from them and falls on the monitor/screen diluting maximum blacks and lowering maximum contrast and saturation (it's a physical process called flare, or glare by some
)
A theoretical purely made up example:
You have a projection screen that gives out 100 ft.L in the white . In da blacks if flare didn't exist (you sitting in outer space and and all stars have gone into black hole status
) the screen gives you 1 ft.L. So you have a 100 to 1 contrast ratio. Colors are 100 to 1 purely saturated too (cus a red object would be at 100 and the blue and green components at 1)
Now comes the white walls in your house. they reflect 100% (actually closer to 90% but hey i'm in theoretical mode made up example
)
your HTscreen is white and it reflects 100% too.
Soooo you have this natural scene on the movie that is on average 18% grey (18% is the value of of averaging all the components of a scene
), with Poppins white 100 ft.L clouds and Darth Vaderish black cloak 1 ft.L shadows (unless you're the new redoriginal Darth Vader that is actually closert to 20 ft.L blue!
) So the facing white walls reflect 100% of the 18% glow of the scene on the screen and that bounces back toward the white screen and the screen reflects 100% of what falls on it.
Sooooooooo.
original white = 100, new white 100 +18 = 118
original blacks 1, new blacks= 1 + 18 = 19
original pure red R = 100, B = 1, G = 1. New RGB = 118, 19,19. (red has now a 19% grey component instead of 1% grey component)
In contrast ratio terms, your original fabulous 100 to 1 contrast has gone 118 to 19 which is equivalent to 6 to 1 contrast ratio.
(6.21 to 1 to be exact in this made up example)
So the darker or blacker the walls the less this will happen.
oh someone says, but my DLP projector says has a 2000:1 contrast ratio.
Well same thing happens:
2000 + 360 = 2360
1 + 360= 361
(18% of 2000 whites is 360
)
that's
2360 to 361
or 6 to 1
(6.537 to 1 if you want to be calculatorish)
that's better isnt it? NOT
So you see, if a person with the cheap 100 to 1 projector has black walls that reflect 0% he has a much better image contrast ratio (100:1) than a guy with the $8,000 DLP with mustang 2000:1 HD2+ chip that has his walls painted 100% white (6:1).
Wow $8,000 down the drain for the price of a bucket of black paint
Of course all this numbers i made were theoretical (as i said white things reflect about 90% instead of 100%, common black things reflect 3% to 5% instead of 0%, and we didn't take into account the distance and size of the walls vs the size of the screen) so the numbers would not be this extreme in real life situations, but i hope it has become clear why black or dark walls are good
.
Little things like this affect image quality more than people think. Same as people that spend $$$$$ in speakers and amplification, the room furnishings and walls acoustic signature may affect more the resulting sound than all the $$$$ pumped into the hardware and end up sounding not too good..
Painting walls/curtains darker is kind of the visual equivalent of adding expensive sound absorption panels for the stereo so you hear the original ambiance on the recording , except paint is cheap and curtains cost the same if they are bright fuscia or dark muted blue
Which brings us to:
Same thing with color walls, strong saturated colors will affect the shadows and give a color cast. Neutral or muted colors would be better.
so black is better than dark grey and dark grey , or dark brown or navy blue, is better than red or green or magenta or yellow or white etc etc walls, curtains, sofas, clothing too
etc
etc.
i would stay away from the magenta/green axis colors , the blue/yellow axis colors are preferable since direct sunlight is yellowish and dffuse skylight is blue (because it's from the sky
) But yellow or light tan, creme, colors are bright (light) not dark.
If I HAD to pick A color, i would use something like dark navy blue i guess
., Or maybe like muted very dark brown or something (like the color of very dark wood?)
otherwise id use dark grey or black
As example red reflects 9% compared to the 3% of black (apart from the color cast that is) DDark blue is in between. You can see this if you turn a TV color bar into black and white, the dark blue bar in b/w is darker than the red)
Now , if you mean curtains in the wall behind the monitor (or the wall the projection screen is on) (like curtains that close to cover the screen or surround it)
well if you have a huge screen that wall and curtains sould be preferably black too
(so they dont affect your perception of the screeeeeeen image
) Under no cirscustances they should be of any bright saturated color or your screen image might color shift in your perception.
Now if the screen is not huge (doesnt cover your field of view like a movie theater) well you could use lighter GREY/NEUTRAL walls/curtains cus your eye will try to adapt what's in front of you to be overall 18% grey (thats how the eye works) (if you have a huge screen, well the DVD images themselves become your 18% on average scenes, but if youre watching a 20" monitor on the end of the room and the walls are painted black, your eye will open its lens trying to compensate, and the screen might look washed out and you adjust the black level (brightness control) down more than it should and the blacks are crushed and you loose shadow details etc , so in this case that wall or curtains should be lighter (still neutral tho, remember color adaptation) but they should be about 18% grey AS COMPARED to how bright your monitor/screen is bright.
(so mmm put a 40 or 50 IRE grey pattern (idealy 45 IRE) from a test disc on your TV and make that wall look like that.
)
The opposite happens if the surrounding walls/curtains are lighter/brighter than 18% grey compared to the monitor: Your eyes lens closes and adapts and because of the bright surround the monitor screen starts to look darker/contrastier, so you automatically misadjust the black level up and loose deep shadows (they become milky grey) and colors loose saturation.
(That's why Lars commented about if a true reference level existed. There is one, displays should be set up using it, but as you can see, what happens when you, or the studio they are transfering the films in have the walls and/or the monitor size different
)
(Thats one reason big huge screens are good, they fill your field of view so you're adapted to them., not the walls/light fixtures, so what you see is what you get)
On the other hand, light or white walls behind the curtains are good IF you have a low contrast LCD or some kind of display that doesnt give you true blacks even if you turn down the brighness: the lighter wall works as an advantage here making the sub-contrasty image appear darker and more contrasty, so after adjusting the low contrast display to the best black you can get from it you could vary the light intensity of the surrounding walls (that's a useful trick to overcome display shortcomings
)
Same would happen if you moved the low contrast display further back and you saw more white wall surrounding it without changing the light intensity, but, you get smaller apparent monitor then
lots of variables!
now to the last part
another reason black is good is: if you have lights turned on in the room, unless you're using special $$ D65 fluorescents, you're using normal fluorescents (grenish) or normal tungsten bulbs (yellowish). (or candles!
) SO your white grey neutral walls, even tho they are neutral, they DON'T look neutral anymore, since the monitor is (hopefully) correctly calibrated to D65 grey (average Daylight) and they are not (or the walls/lights are so bright that your eye adapts to them and they do look white/grey, but then your monitor starts looking blue.
A constant color cordination strugle happens as you watch things on the screen and in the room may also happen.
Needless to say, if you have lights on in the room , none of it should fall on the screen: more flare, less costrast , less colors, now youre shining a light directly to a thing that's trying to form images by throwing light at you, don't give it competition, shade your screen from it. Rembember tho, that even shading the screen from it, this room lights will also bounce off the non black walls too onto the screen
so many variables!
it's good that the brain works hard and tries to fix this things before youre aware of them.
Well those are the general guidelines/ideal stuff, depending how dedicated is your HT room, as opposed to a normal livingg space area (after all you have to live in it
) you could try to implement this as much as you can or accept. Just remember all the money and time you have invested in buying hardware and movies and watching them. I have friends that ask me Should I buy that $10,000 DLP projector with the 4000:1 contrast ratio spec with the $1000 greytech screen and $600 extra lumens output light bulb and the first thing i ask them is: have you painted your walls black yet??
you had to ask
hope i answered your question and helped on your quest of DisneyTheaterNirvana
makes you wonder how many Telecine rooms follow the rainbow
ps, Since this topic IS about different color rendition versions on DVDs
, for those who'd like to see an example of variations and might have not stumbled on it, I posted pics of the two color rendition versions (LD vs DVD) of Yellow Sub on the Yellow Sub off topic. I also added one I made doing a simple basic rebalancing of the color tempt of it, to see it that accounted for most of the differences, where you can see that some of the colors didn't really change from one into the other, so they were different.
