The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released NISTIR 6657 – Detailing the Measurment of Color Light Output.

Jan. 20, 2009Boulder, CO – The National Institute of Standards and Technology today released NISTIR 6657.This document details the recommended laboratory procedures for the collection of Projector Color Light Output. NIST also reports on experiments that show the same dramatic differences in projector color Gamut that Lumita has demonstrated in current business projectors.

ABSTRACT: A standard methodology exists for estimating the flux from front projection displays by sampling the projected illuminance of a white source signal. With the advent and use of white projection primaries, a dramatic increase in flux can be achieved over the combination of red, green, and blue primaries alone. However, when a white primary is used saturated-color areas in an image are constrained to low flux levels relative to the display maximum and further undergo a perceptual compression in relative lightness. As a result, bright saturated colors cannot be rendered accurately and the appearance of full-color imagery is distorted. The display of color-accurate imagery does not generally use the white primary due to these problems, and thus there is a need for providing an equivalent flux measurement that will better describe the performance of all projectors when rendering full-color imagery. Background research and a method utilizing the source-signal color primaries are described.