[rescue] Looking : Sgi/Sun stuff

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2005 at 08:39:16AM -0500, Wes Will wrote:
> >even $30k CRTs are highly imperfect.
> 
> All too true.
> 
> >Apple claims people are doing print color proofing on their cinema
> >displays, BTW.
> 
> Oh, you can do it, and for the mass market it's fine.  Heck for the mass of
> sheeple it's better than they expect.  It all depends on the audience.
> I've done pre-press work in the past, though, and I'm tellin' you true, an
> old press man can eye-match to a chip sheet all the ay across the room and
> drive you crazy mixing ink, if the shade is off.
> 
> Once I did about a half-dozen batches of printer's ink, sequentially, the
> last three with the various bosses breathing down my neck, of a colour of
> ink known as "Mary Kay business card pink" (a most PUTRID colour, imho) and
> we finally ascertained that a) it wasn't my fault, I wasn't fired. b) I
> really -did- know how to use a gram scale and figure proportions., and c)
> somebody had tainted one of the mix colour cans with a tiny bit of black.
> You can't correct for black....

Well, I wouldn't go brushing off people who can see better than me, but
I know I can't see quite that well and I can only worry about what I can
see. 

My standard is what I can see, and at NAB I had the oportunity to see a
lot of really expensive monitors, including pricey Sony BVMs, looking
amazingly badly.  Alas, that included the ones in my employers own
booth (a pair of PVMs or BVMs [they were rented and I no longer recall
which] and some plasma display [borrowed]).  And don't get me started on
the signal path.

While the more expensive BVMs might be able to paint every pixel in a
high def image, they don't appear to be able to handle high frequency
images with the color acuracy one might hope for.  However, to me this
is mostly only visible with test patterns, so if I had such a monitor, I
would hug it daily and not worry about the imperfections.  The same
probably goes for Apple Cinema Displays as well.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
jdboyd at jdboyd.net
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/