Calibrations of Colorimeters for Display Measurements: Some Commercial Colorimeters Have Uncertainties in Display-Color Measurements That Are Too Large for Many Commercial, Industrial and Military Applications - But New NIST-Developed Calibration Proc...

Published

December 1, 1999

Author(s)

Steven W. Brown, Yuqin Zong, Yoshihiro Ohno

Abstract

Commercial color measuring instruments (colorimeters and spectroradiometers) are currently used in a number of product development and control environments, as well as for product acceptance testing and a variety of other applications. In many cases, the instruments are used without much attention paid to the accuracy of the measurements while products are accepted or rejected depending on their measured color. To properly use an instrument to measure display colors, the measurement uncertainty should be known. Only then can you tell how well your color-measurement system is performing, and only then can you tell whether it can do the job you need it to do. Colorimeters are normally calibrated against an incandescent source with a spectral distribution approximating the CIE Standard Illuminant A. Significant errors can subsequently occur when these colorimeters are used to measure displays with colors having very different spectral distributions from the calibration source. In response, we developed a calibration facility at NIST tailored to display measurements. Upon calibration, a colorimeter will be able to measure any color of a display with a known uncertainty in both chromaticity and luminance. In this work, we describe the calibration facility and present results of calibrations of five commercial instruments against a CRT display.

Citation

Information Display: The Official Journal of the Society for Information Display

Volume

15

Issue

No. 12

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

calibration, colorimeter, displays, metrology, spectroradiometer

Citation

Brown, S. , Zong, Y. and Ohno, Y. (1999), Calibrations of Colorimeters for Display Measurements: Some Commercial Colorimeters Have Uncertainties in Display-Color Measurements That Are Too Large for Many Commercial, Industrial and Military Applications - But New NIST-Developed Calibration Proc..., Information Display: The Official Journal of the Society for Information Display (Accessed May 17, 2024)