Lighting and colour quality in a television system

This paper outlines a novel experiment that was conducted in an attempt to quantify the performance of different electric lamps from the point of view of television colour reproduction. The experiment examined the subjective responses of television viewers to changes in picture quality resulting from changes in the (studio) scene illumination. This led to the establishment of a Mean Subjective Rating (MSR) for each test source. Secondly, an attempt was made to correlate this subjective data with measured colour differences, in the television picture, resulting from the same changes in the studio lighting. Only moderate correlation was detected. Further investigation established, however, that there was significant correlation between the MSR and the CIE colour rendering index of each test source. The possibility of applying some of the newer varieties of light sources to television lighting is analysed, using these findings.