DIY colorimeter
posted Mar 19th 2007 11:11pm by Will O'Brienfiled under: home entertainment hacks
[brian] tipped me to this excellent colormeter project for calibrating your home theater/HD/etc It was designed specifically for the HCFR Colormeter software project. The project page is in english, but the probe writeup is in french. The fish well help you understand it while you resist the taunts avoid the flying cows. The device has at least one color sensor (a second is optional as well as an IR led or two for computer hardware controls) and connects to your computer via USB. The brain is a PIC 18F2550 (the fish calls it a PEAK) – no in circuit programming, you’ll need a programmer to build it.
I say we lean how to use google for translating instead of making us copy into into altavista.
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.homecinema-fr.com/colorimetre/sonde.php&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dhttp://www.homecinema-fr.com/colorimetre/sonde.php%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1B3GGGL_en__212__212
In any case, those sensors look quite cool!
Although, I would worry about using them for anything where you are really worried about color. This is because of how tv’s work. This sensor tells you the ratio of red/blue/green, so if you stick it in front of a TV the outputs will be almost exactly proportional to the r/g/b ratio that the TV is set for. So far so good, but in this day and age the colors used be a TV are no longer the same. There is a very noticable difference between a pure blue screen with my projector and with a LCD display, red and green are not as noticeable. So you would set the r/g/b ratios the same for all of your gear, but the actual color seen by our eyes will vary slightly depending on the color pallet used by the TV.
But in general, a sensor like that would be a very fun toy! And you get the super bonus points for using USB…
Posted at 12:03 am on Mar 20th, 2007 by ...