In December’s rAVe ED newsletter, there was a reprint of an article thatInfoComm published in September of 2011. It was written by Brad Grimes and included an interview with my friend Matt Silverman. I thought it was so timely because I had already began this month’s article. I urge you to take a quick moment and read the article, if you have not done so yet.

The article was about InfoComm’s standards on projector contrast ratio. Matt mentions in the article that his most demanding faculty have always been the art history professors. While some other faculty have concerns about quality, it is our art faculty who also have the most concerns about color and contrast. We had professors demanding slide projectors in their classrooms, eight years after Kodak stopped making them. They insisted that ten years of technological advances still have not reached the quality of the classic slide projector. I hear this often from faculty I work with, and in many cases they are correct.

Over the past few years, higher resolution projectors at more affordable costs have helped with delivering a better resolution. In my experience, however, color rendering is a much bigger issue than resolution. In order to understand the issue better I recently took a walk around an academic building with a faculty member and looked at the same image on multiple screens and monitors. In every single room, the image looked different. Suddenly I understood how difficult it is to teach fine details, such as how a specific artist puts golden glows around his main subjects, if that golden glow does not show up on every projector or shows up as a slightly different color.

In my quest to solve this problem for our faculty, I was introduced to color management. The basic concept of color management is simple: All colors have very specific definitions, and all computers agree on this definition. However, for various reasons (age, use, quality) the displays we connect our computers to don’t all show these colors the same way. So, what we have to do is determine how “off” our displays are and have our computers adjust their output based on that number.

There are some fairly easy tools on the market to do this. We used a product call the “GretagMacbeth”. The product contains a “beamer” that we set on a tripod and point at the screen. Then your computer, projecting on the screen, runs software that displays a series of known colors. The beamer determines how “off” these colors are, and develops an .icc profile for that display. This file tells your computer how it needs to compensate for the projector in color, brightness and contrast.

This ten-minute process can dramatically correct color problems in your classrooms or presentation spaces. Our faculty loved the changes and are now more ready than ever to change over to digital. However, there are some problems and considerations.

First, you need to remember that this process does not make an image look better, it makes the image look like it is supposed to look. A bad scan or a poorly rendered image file is not suddenly going to look wonderful. Also, it is important to remember to calibrate the source of the digital image. For example, we have a slide librarian who scans images to be used digitally by our faculty. We need to be sure that we calibrate her monitors as well. Otherwise, she will correct the images to look right on her monitor, but will look wrong on a projector elsewhere.

Second, it is ideal to design systems so that the computer recognizes all attached displays. If you have rooms in which your computers feed into a matrix, switcher or splitter and your computer does not recognize the multiple displays, you will not be able to set different profiles. Therefore, managing the color on the projector will make the presenter’s monitor wrong. In many cases this may be acceptable, as the lecturer or presenter knows how the image is supposed to look, and they are more concerned with the audience’s experience. However, in a scenario where both need to be correct, or perhaps a room with multiple monitors of a different model, you will need to provide the ability for the computer to recognize all the displays.

A third issue to keep in mind is that displays experience color shifting over time. As lamps get older or heat alters the panel, there are slight changes in the color. For your pickiest user, you may need to do a re-calibration once a semester to ensure you have the most accurate colors possible. It is important to note, however, that the .icc is a specific file for the computer and projector you created the file on. It cannot be transferred to a different computer and projector combination and be expected to look correct.

If you need a real upper on a bad day, profile one of your classrooms then call in some of your art history faculty. You will put a smile on their faces for sure. Going through this simple process is also a great way to continue to get the most out of your investment. It is an easy, yet very obvious way, to take your service to the next level.

I also believe this is a great opportunity for integrators. While this work is not hard, it is a pain to get around and keep up with. It would be a fantastic chance to get into a maintenance contract with a school. Maybe, in addition to doing color management, you can change the filters (and the lamps if
necessary). I would certainly entertain a discussion with an integrator about entering into a maintenance contract for this type of service. Alone, it may not be the biggest money-maker but it gets you into the school. From there, once trust is built, making suggestions on upgrades, etc. could get you into some more lucrative installation jobs.

Scott is very active in the field, having presented at both regional and national conferences. In 2011, he was appointed as chair of the Technology Managers Council of InfoComm. Scott can be contacted via LinkedIn, on Twitter athttp://www.twitter.com/stiner or via email at stiner08@gmail.com