Chapter 1 Video Basics: Use of Camera and Monitor Adjustments

Abstract

This chapter discusses the practical aspects of adjusting the video camera and the monitor to prevent the loss of specimen image gray-level information, a subject that is often treated in a most cursory fashion in the owners manuals for cameras and monitors. The problem one faces in coordinating camera and monitor adjustments is that there are too many interacting variables and no standard against which to evaluate the performance of the system. One can vary the intensity of the optical image on the photosensitive surface of the camera, camera settings, and monitor settings. All three appear interactive and can be used individually to seemingly optimize the quality of the image to some extent. When done in a haphazard fashion, empirical “knob twiddling” opens the real possibility of loosing specimen information, typically in the brightest and/or darkest portions of the image. The chapter also reviews, in a simplified fashion, a few aspects of the monochrome composite video signal, produced by tube-type cameras and conventional charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras.