On the Quality of Color-Television Images and the Perception of Color Detail

A theoretical and experimental study of the NTSC color system supported by color photographs shows that contrast range and color saturation obtained with commercial tricolor kinescopes provide a larger color space than provided by color motion pictures. In fine detail more than 60% of full color information is transmitted and reproduced by the NTSC system, because the bandwidth restrictions of the electrical color signals (I, Q) do not affect definition in the vertical dimension and have a smaller effect on the reproduction of horizontal color detail than indicated by earlier evaluations which disregarded the two-dimensional nature of the image. — The detail color reproduction appears adequate to the eye, because the color errors remaining are small although perceptible. This fact is significant because the spatial sine-wave response functions of the color discriminators of the visual system are found to be substantially independent of the color of light and similar to the spatial sine-wave luminance response function of the eye.

Print ISSN

0361-4573

Published

1958-12

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/J16981