lab@rochester.UUCP (Lab Manager) (12/20/83)
From: Lab Manager <lab> What is everybody else doing to avoid glare for a) general viewing of high quality video displays (1 or more people) b) photographing of same We have a new ikonas fb et al., and need some kind of lighting control. the current suggestions are 1) a hood, mostly good for photographing the screen, and 2) a dark room of sorts, good for photography and possibly big enough for several people to see the screen at the same time. the first suggestion obviously limits the screen to being used by one person at a time, but is great for getting high quality photos off the screen. the second is more costly in time and money, and keeps the screen from being time-shared between several people in the same room, but not all behind the light screen. Does anyone out there have experience with either/both of these attempts. Other suggestions? thanks in advance. Mark Brucks Lab Manager, Dept. of Computer Science University of Rochester uucp: (seismo | allegra)!rochester!lab arpa: lab@rochester
dmmartindale@watrose.UUCP (Dave Martindale) (12/22/83)
There seem to be two separate problems with light on the screen. Light which falls directly on the screen washes out the darker areas of the image, reducing contrast and colour saturation. Light sources anywhere within a cone projecting out from the monitor face show up as bright spots reflecting from the glass CRT face. If you are doing photography, you have to eliminate both sources of light. If you are just viewing an image on the monitor, the reflected images seem to be easy for people to ignore as long as they are not too bright. In the graphics lab at Waterloo, where there may be several people using our single Ikonas in sequence, the main colour monitor is in the main lab area which contains most of the terminals, and we keep this room fairly dark. Lighting is by incandescent lamps on dimmers. Among other things, this means that we tend to avoid using terminals with long-persistance phosphors because the smearing they produce is much worse in a dim room (so we use Genies rather than Ambassadors). Most of the terminals in the lab face the end of the room with the monitor; thus anyone can throw up an image and get an idea of what it looks like, walking up to the monitor if they want to see fine detail. This arrangement would not work well if you want to photograph off the monitor, since you'd have to turn off all the room lights, preventing anyone from using the terminals. This isn't really a problem for us, since most images we generate are intended to be displayed with normal NTSC television field and line rates and sync, and thus can be recorded on film using our Dunn camera. Dave Martindale