As it turns out, there are a number of reputable organizations around the globe, who have published, (and continue to publish) display metrology standards for the display industry. However, in the popular (including the popular technical) press, there appears to be a gap - some of the agreed upon techniques have not been filtered down for consumption by the masses (read - lay people, like myself).
This gap appears to have been addressed by the marketing execs, who have a mandate to reach the consumer, by promoting their brand-specific, home-grown, insignificant-to-the- technically initiated, marketing concoctions - which have been termed "specsmanship" by Dr. Edward F. Kelley, who first coined the term (or at least popularized it), and I cite from the IDMS-
3.3.1 SPECSMANSHIP & WIGGLE-ROOM ELIMINATION
Specsmanship amounts to deliberately misleading people by providing specifications that do not realistically portray the
display characteristics under normal use. The term “wiggle-room” arises from a lack of absolute precision in the language
used in specifying a requirement where the readers know exactly what is really meant by the requirement, but because of the
lack of precision of the language, they deliberately find a loop-hole in the requirement or deliberately misinterpret the
requirement to their own advantage. It can amount to a form of specsmanship.
If the manufacturer describes or specifies how to set up the display for its intended use to provide the very best
quality and most pleasing and useful image for the task at hand, then use the manufacturer’s setup specifications to set up the
display. If the manufacturer’s setup specifications are not provided or are not suitable for the intended task then you should
use the other suggestions presented in these sections. However, it is not permissible—and it violates the philosophy of this
document—to adjust the display to extremes in order to get extreme measurement results if such adjustments make the
display unsuitable, impractical, and unreasonable for the intended task, or drives it to extremes beyond the anticipated
production and/or distribution configuration. Calling for such extreme settings disqualifies the manufacturer’s setup
specifications from being used to set up the display. The term manufacturer’s setup specifications or any other idea presented
in these sections is not a license for anyone tweaking the display to an impractical state and then obtaining measurement
results for a public disclosure. That is, the display needs to look as good as it can for its intended task and not be configured
with unrealistic settings that are used only to make the measurement results look good for competition or marketing purposes.
I do believe, that most of us want to know about the matte/glossy characteristics of a set - up front, and the industry and their puppets (not you CNET) need to push on this. Are you hearing me CNET Asia?
If some of the characterizations in the IDMS need to be combined/reduced to become more useful (e.g. lambertian/haze), more perceptually meaningful (e.g. to what extent can this display be a good fit in my viewing environment), there may be some work ahead. (We have done that with temperature and humidity-->temperature-humidity index, with overall success)
-nony
