What contrast ratio should i look for

Imagine that you are creating content and your screen has contrast ratio as well as decent black levels. What happens to the content you have created if it is shown on a display with contrast and deeper black levels? Worst case, your gorgeous content is displayed with noise and artefacts in the dark areas of the content. The name of the fifth category is currently named Content Creation for Corporate Communications, and has a contrast ratio at There's a solid reason for the higher ratio for content creation here: it gives the headroom needed when content is played back on new displays with high contrast levels and deeper blacks.

That's also why we debated whether we should require a maximum black level on the display. The ANSI standard combines important aspects — such as display brightness and ambient light — in a complete system ratio.

Depending on what you want to achieve from your installation, you need to consider which of the system contrast ratios is most applicable.

By understanding the differences and recognizing your audience's needs, you're headed in the right direction. Topics: digital projection , direct view displays , contrast ratio , ansi standards , piscr , dvdiscr , installation. By: David Aleksandersen. David Aleksandersen has extensive experience from the audiovisual industry and is an active blogger.

He has been responsible for developing and executing marketing, sales and initiatives in knowledge transfer and partner training for more than 20 years. I like to call this "intra-scene contrast ratio" though I'm certainly open to something better if anyone has an idea. The reason there's a distinction is due to most TVs now having a dynamic contrast ratio.

This is a broad term to describe technologies that augment the native contrast ratio of the TV. These work by having the TV sense what content it's showing, and adjust the overall light output accordingly.

If you've ever adjusted an LCD's backlight , the TV is basically doing this in real time depending on the video. When an adjustable backlight, or a projector's iris, is used in conjunction with circuitry to monitor the video signal, it is able to adjust the overall light output in real time depending on what's onscreen.

This dynamic contrast ratio looks like this:. A bright image is bright, a dark image is dark. Done well, this does increase the apparent contrast ratio of a display, but not nearly as much as the numbers would suggest. A TV with 5,, contrast ratio would be unbelievable to look it. Too bad one doesn't exist. A TV with a high dynamic contrast ratio may look better than a TV that has no such circuitry, but it won't look as good as a display with a high native contrast ratio.

Picture the end credits of a movie. A display with a high native contrast will show this as a dark black background, and punchy white text. A display with a high dynamic contrast ratio may have a similarly dark background, but the text won't be bright.

Again, I can't make the image on your screen darker or lighter, but here's kinda what it would look like:. As you can see, a display with a high native contrast is the way to go, if that's what you're going for. The night sky is black, but the streetlights pop out. The day sky is bright, but the dark jacket is dark. This is more like CRT, more like film, more like life. The technology with the highest native contrast ratio is Sony's version SXRD comes in a rather distant second.

Third is plasma, though some DLP projectors are close. LCD has come a long way in the past decade, but still lags behind the other technologies. Thankfully, the better LCD manufactures know this and have come up with a few ways to mimic the high native contrast ratio of the other technologies. The best way to get a high intra-scene contrast ratio with LCDs is with local dimming. It's not done on a per-pixel level, but LED zones are generally small enough that the overall effect is quite good.

It's far better than what the LCD panel can do itself. You can also use the Color Picker to search for a better color tone and immediately get the current contrast ratio. With the Contrast Checker from Acart Communications , you can set the colors via hexadecimal code, RGB values, but also via an image file. This is helpful, for example, if you have a screen design and want to check the contrasts.

Besides the evaluation, this online tool offers the possibility to display the results in greyscales and to create a history for the tested color combinations. If you are looking for a simple contrast ratio checker, you will find it with Contrast Ratio by Lea Verou.

This test tool is kept simple. On the left, you can enter the background, on the right, the text color. You get the contrast ratio and can also swap the colors if necessary. Just as simple is the Color Contrast Checker from Siteimprove. You can use it to check the colors of any website. Color Safe helps graphic artists and web designers to select WCAG-compliant and suitable font colors from different color groups for the selected background.

The minimum contrast ratio applies not only to text but also to other elements such as icons or frames in input fields. If you want to know how people with color vision defects perceive colors, you get a simulation of the most common color vision defects with Color Oracle.

If the background is a solid color or all black or all white then the relative luminance of the text can be maintained by making sure that each of the text letters have 4. If the background or the letters vary in relative luminance or are patterned then the background around the letters can be chosen or shaded so that the letters maintain a 4. For example, if a letter is lighter at the top than it is a the bottom, it may be difficult to maintain the contrast ratio between the letter and the background over the full letter.

In this case, the designer might darken the background behind the letter, or add a thin black outline at least one pixel wide around the letter in order to keep the contrast ratio between the letter and the background above 4. The contrast ratio can sometimes be maintained by changing the relative luminance of the letters as the relative luminance of the background changes across the page.

For example, if a page is very light on one edge and fades to very dark on the other edge, there is no color that can run across the page and meet the contrast guidelines on both edges.

One way of addressing this would be to change the lightness of the letters as well so that each letter always meets the contrast ratio for the background that is immediately behind the letter. Another method is to provide a halo around the text that provides the necessary contrast ratio if the background image or color would not normally be sufficiently different in relative luminance.