Color appearance of a display changes under various illumination conditions

Abstract

Different technologies have given rise to a wide variety of everlarger visual displays. The conditions under which displays are viewed are diverse as well: inside stores for promoting products, in airports and train stations for displaying travel information, and in home theaters. Most of these viewing conditions include flare—an effect caused by ambient light—which has often been ignored in previous studies. Yet achieving consistent color reproduction requires understanding the impact of the surround conditions on the color and appearance of an image. Some color-appearance experiments have been carried out using various types of displays,1–3 although most were performed with a dark surround. For this reason, David Brainard and colleagues4 and Heui-Keun Choh’s team5 investigated the effect of ambient illumination on the appearance of achromatic colors on a CRT display using a color-matching method. They did find an effect due to chromatic adaptation, but did not consider alterations in the brightness or the colorfulness of the stimuli. The present study focuses on the change in color appearance of a large display in response to various surround conditions: dark, dim, average, and bright. We used a 42inch Samsung plasma display panel with pixel resolution of 1024 × 768 and a display area of 934 × 532mm2. Surround conditions were applied to two categories of illumination. In the first case, the ambient light provided little viewing flare, so the display colors were unchanged but observers could perceive varying brightness in the surround (see Figure 1). In the second category, a brighter surround was used and more viewing flare was added to the colors (see Figure 2). This represents an actual viewing situation. It can be difficult to distinguish which phenomena to attribute to the surround effect, because observers see the displayed colors Figure 1. In the first-category surround observers cannot see the illuminating source directly because it is covered with a diffusing cabinet and faces the wall.