Recalibrate

Technology has come a way I guess.

I watched, as a kid and adolescent, those black and white TVs with rabbit ears sticking out the back.

They had an actual knob on the TV; you turned that to change the channels. To turn the damn thing on and off–there was a knob for that too. That was about it. Although I do think there was something to make the picture stop flipping as it sometimes would or zigzagging.

zenith.jpgBut that was about it.

Yesterday a guy came to our house from Best Buy to “recalibrate” the TV we bought from them. Recalibrate?

According to the guy, who was very informed, TVs are generally first calibrated–whatever that is–to look their very best in the TV showroom. Showrooms are all in door light and usually bright with fluorescents. To keep the picture from being washed out, the blues are turned up high and so is the white background, to keep the picture glowing.,

So this guy came with a laptop and some other device to calibrate our TV to the conditions of our living room, some indoor light, some outdoor light.

And–damn!–what do you know? but it looked better. Flesh tones were more exact and you could see the blades of grass on the football field.

Is this TV better than the old black and white. I guess so, although it has wires sticking out of it I will never dare to touch.

Later the guy emailed us the graphs he created when he recalibrated our machines via email in adobe pdf files.

There were no emails when the world was black and white. No pdf files either. But we did have Walter Cronkite. In black and white.

That was something. walterk.jpg

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