[WinMac]

Thomas Kase(tkase[at]elrey.us-style.com)
Sun, 21 Feb 1999 21:09:53 -0500

>
> While surfing around, I stumbled across a Salon Magazine article at:
>
> <<http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/10/21feature.html>.
>
>
> About halfway down, there was a paragraph that I'm quoting below; but
> the issue merits discussion here - Mainly that games created on the Mac
> and ported to the PC appear too dark. The default Mac settings are for a
> gamma of 1.8, and a 9300 degree white point.
>
>
> What am I missing here?
>
> Obsidian? A better effort, here. It is at least visually interesting, and
> the surreal story is more engaging. But it has severe flaws, too. For one
> thing, the graphics are so dark it's very difficult to see almost
> anything in the game -- a fundamental problem for graphics designed on
> the Mac and transported to the PC, which always displays things more
> darkly. For another, the surreal nature of the game makes it difficult to
> keep your bearings -- and harder to solve the puzzles, since "logic"
> doesn't always apply. Never mind the fact that it was one of the few
> products Rocket Science shipped before it went under -- and that Rocket
> Science was notorious in the field for poor project management and
> throwing too much money around.

The problem is intractable - PCs have from the beginning been catering
to other areas than printing and issues like color management have until
now been a ho-hum issue for most, if not all, PCs.

The real issue for PCs have been to crank out as shiny monitors as possible
and damn the consequences - too be blunt. :-) Which is why PC monitors
are set way to cold (typically 9300K), which is far too bright to represent
the original colors in a proper way.

Macs on the other hand have been making a living from the printing and graphics
industries since day one. Mac monitors are typically set somewhere in the
5000K to 6000K range (depending on what kind of work you're into and the
quality of your hardware. The result is that a Mac monitor set up for accurate
color looks quite yellowish to those used PC monitors.

Serious color proofing work is of course done in darkened rooms with controlled
lighting.

The results of all of the above is that Mac produced graphics when viewed on a
regular PC monitor appear too dark.

As others have stated on the list, the "solution" (for web work) is to set the
Mac monitors halfway and wind up with grahics that look a little off on all
monitors. ;-)

Complaining about Macs in this case reminds me of when I was in the military
and during a field exercise, we encountered a hill that was not on the map...
one of the top brass then said (jokingly) that "the map is never wrong, ignore
the hill"

In this case, the map is indeed wrong and the Macs are right on the color - not
that journalists will ever pay attention....

Thomas Kase

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