Color Resolution -- A Dirty Little Secret

Color (chrominance) resolution represents the ability to reproduce fine multicolored picture detail, or the ability to
reproduce a sharp transition from one color to another.

While we see and hear advertised claims of greater and greater TV resolution, published horizontal resolution
applies to black, gray, and white only. Color resolution is much less.

Very little is said about color resolution in the advertising or description of TV and video equipment. It is difficult
to get information about color resolution.

Lower color resolution is the result of the need to reduce the total video signal content to fit within the allotted
bandwidth, spectrum space, or bit rate, taking into account the lesser sensitivity of the human eye to fine color
detail, and also a result of holding down the costs of manufacturing of equipment.

(We will use the terms color, chrominance, and chroma interchangeably although this is not absolutely correct
usage.)

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the color resolution of NTSC, HDTV, S-video, etc?

How did the color resolution standards evolve?

What are some of the weak links in color resolution?

How has color resolution degraded further due to skimping?

What are some of the easily seen results of color resolution.

How can I find out or judge the color resolution?

How does the human eye resolve color detail?

What Is Color Resolution All About?

Color resolution refers to the number of color changes that can be reproduced in a given distance span.

Color resolution affects how crisp a boundary between areas of different colors can be.

Color resolution is measured in "lines of resolution" over a given distance span just as is regular resolution
(luminance resolution) where each "line of resolution" equals one color change.

Changes between a light and a dark shade of the same color are luminance changes and are not affected by
limitations in the color resolution.

If we had subject matter with increasingly narrower object sso as to show pushing the limit of color resolution, the
loss of color as seen on the screen is gradual and often subtle.

One of the reasons HDTV looks much better than standard TV is because HDTV can have much greater color
resolution.

Horizontal Color Resolution for Typical Video Applications

Video Sources

NTSC Broadcasts (composite) – 120 lines best, 40 - 48 lines typical for reddish orange and greenish blue; 40 - 48
lines for most other color transitions.

VHS, S-VHS, 8mm, Hi-8, all Beta (composite or S-video) – The standard is 400 KHz bandwidth yielding 32 lines
best, 25 lines typical.

12" Laser Disk (composite) – 120 lines best, but could be as low as 40 lines.

DVD (S-video) -- The standard is 120 lines.

DVD (component video) -- 270 lines best, 240 lines acceptable. Color resolution is half of the luminance
resolution.

Computer Video -- Color resolution is equal to the luminance resolution, which can exceed 1000 lines. The most
common limiting factor is the monitor's picture tube.

U.S. HDTV -- The horizontal color resolution is half of the luminance resolution most of the time, 1/4 of the
luminance resolution in a few cases. Both 1080i and 720p normally have a 16:9 aspect ratio, and the color
resolution (lines per picture height) is 540 (occasionally 270) for 1080i and 360 (occasionally 180) for 720p. When
the color horizontal resolution is a half of the luminance resolution, the color vertical resolution is also half the
luminance resolution. When the color horizontal resolution is one fourth of the luminance resolution the color
vertical resolution equals the luminance resolution.

Video Formats

Composite video and S-video have a practical limit of 120 lines of color resolution and a theoretical limit of 140
lines. While S-video connections were first made available for VCR's, the color resolution for recording remained
around 32 lines.

There is no theoretical limit for color resolution for either Y/Pb/Pr (YUV) component video or RGB. Witness that
the color resolution standard for 1080I HDTV is 540 TV lines (per distance equal to the picture height @ 16:9)
while the luminance resolution for DVD is less, 405 TVL if the program has the same 16:9 aspect ratio.

The most common digital video transmission formats have color resolution half of the luminance resolution both
horizontally and vertically.

Vertical Color Resolution

For all analog video (NTSC, PAL, S-video, composite video, etc.) the vertical color resolution equals the vertical
luminance resolution. Each scan line can have color independent of its neighbors.

The same is true of digital video, although most available source material has vertical color resolution half of the
luminance resolution, that is, every two scan lines share the same coloration.
Mediocre comb filters will detract from vertical color resolution of analog sources. The "two line" comb filter
actually loses more vertical color resolution than "no" comb filter. It is common to observe a discolored stripe two
scan lines thick where two color patches that are one atop the other meet. In that case it took three scan lines to
transition from one color to the other. Most "three line" and better (3D) comb filters do not produce this artifact.

For most digital video material, some added loss of vertical color resolution occurs with interlaced (live video)
material because each pair of scan lines that share color consists of two odd scan lines or two even scan lines.
Some added loss of vertical color resolution occurs with film source video also, if the processing does not match up
the color with the proper scan lines.

Many HDTV sets use a scaler. Rather than draw 480 scan lines on the screen for DVD (and NTSC broadcasts) and
1080 scan lines for HDTV, they always draw 1080 scan lines for a complete video frame. Since the 1080 scan lines
are always in the form of two staggered alternately drawn 540 scan line fields, there is reasonable compatibility
with DVD. During the conversion (scaling) from 480 scan lines to 540 scan lines, discoloration can occur where
two color patches that are one atop the other meet. This discoloration should not be more than a single scan line.
Properly done, the scaling actually does not reduce the vertical color resolution because all of the original
independently colored scan lines should still be there.

Finding out the color resolution

The high end home theater viewer will want to make sure the TV set has good color horizontal resolution after the
comb filter. For an ordinary (non-HDTV) TV, eighty lines would probably be an absolute minimum; 120 lines is
the specification for S-video, but the more the better. However one of the big improvements of HDTV over
ordinary TV is much improved color resolution. 120 lines is marginal color resolution for HDTV.

. Technical information about color resolution can be found in textbooks available in most public libraries but
almost nothing is said about this in advertising.

Asking the Manufacturer

This is not easy. Horizontal color resolution of the TV internal circuits is almost never published. Even
knowledgeable salesmen and manufacturers' customer service rep's usually don't know. You might have to call the
manufacturer's headquarters. If the resolution is above 80 lines (one megahertz) and the design engineer has some
pride in the product, he might give you the answer.
Magazine Articles, Peer Reviews

Unfortunately most magazine articles and reviews give little or no information about color resolution or color
circuit bandwidth..

There is no easy way of knowing what the preserved color resolution of any given program material is, considering
that there are numerous places in the production process where color resolution could be lost. Without source
material that has color resolution known to be good, it is more difficult to verify the color resolution of a TV set.

Obvious Consequences Of Color Resolution

o Color transitions or boundaries are not sharp and crisp

For an ordinary TV broadcast viewed up close, you can see that, going from left to right, any change of color (other
than to or from black or white) is blended, smeared if you insist (or has a blackor gray gap in between). . If you are
familiar with a color wheel representation of colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, magenta, back to red
with pastels near the center) the transition or smearing may look like the intermediate colors a line drawn on the
wheel between two colors goes through.

o For closely spaced colored details, the colors may be quite incorrect.

This is not always obvious since the viewer might not know what the correct colors should be. Lesser color
resolution means that as the electron beam draws a scan line, it may be unable to get all the way from one desired
color to the next before it has to start changing to a third color for a spot yet further along the scan line.

Fine light to dark horizontal detail should still be seen.

Judging Color Resolution

It is at best moderately difficult to measure color resolution using the best test patterns available today, and very
difficult to measure color resolution viewing normal program material.

It is much better to compare the same picture on two TV sets as opposed to trying to evaluate color resolution on
just one set. "Good" color resolution as seen proves good color resolution in the TV set, but "not so good" color
resolution does not prove deficient resolution in the TV set. It is entirely possible that the source material, or some
other component such as the DVD player, could be deficient.

The lesser sensitivity of the human eye to color resolution shortcomings which made NTSC composite video
possible also makes judging color resolution more difficult and time consuming.

Available Color Resolution Tests

Color resolution is really bad if you see obtrusive dark gaps or discoloration where two patches of contrasting color
meet, when you are not sitting really close to the TV (within eight times the screen height).

Do not use a VCR to play color resolution tests for a TV or other video product. All VCR's have very low color
resolution.

Suggested Tests

o Barney the dinosaur. Observe Barney himself, notably where purple meets green. The lesser the dark gap and the
more freedom from graininess, the better.

o A standard color bar test pattern with the large upright bars at the top of the screen. Observe the dark boundary
between the red and blue bars, and between the green and magenta bars. The thinner and the more freedom from
crawling zipper edges, the better.

o On a newscast or sportscast, observe the colored bar that appears from time to time near the bottom of the screen
(usually with red and blue stripes) where players' names, sports statistics, stock ticker numbers, etc. are displayed.
Look for a horizontal line of discoloration, two scan lines thick, where the color stripes meet. Note, sometimes this
line of discoloration is part of the decorative trim around the colored bars and not a resolution deficiency. Compare
several TV sets including some really cheap ones.

o The Snell & Wilcox zone plate test on the Video Essentials test disk.

The only formal color resolution test pattern I know of is the sets of medium to thin colored vertical stripes near the
bottom of the Snell and Wilcox zone plate chart, one of which is recorded on the Video Essentials DVD. There are
three tests, for 0.5 MHz or 40 lines of resolution, for 1.0 MHz (80 lines), and for 1.5 MHz (120 lines).
In the example I am judging the color resolution to be around 80 lines, or 1.0 MHz, maybe a bit more.

If you see dark gaps in the 0.5 MHz (yellow and blue) test almost as wide as or wider than the colored stripes, then
the color resolution is quite poor.

To keep this discussion simple I cannot explain the consequences of sine waves versus square waves here except
that an absolutely sharp transition from one color to another requires a square wave while a sine wave represents a
blended (or smeared) color transition or a transition with a dark gap. Meanwhile the upper limit of resolution or
frequency response is where the electronic circuit will reproduce a sine wave but not a square wave of a given
frequency.

If there is no red in the 1.5 MHz bars the color resolution is well below 120 lines. If there is no red in the 1.0 MHz
bars, the color resolution is well below 80 lines. Be sure to stand far enough back so you do not see the color dots
or stripes on a picture tube, and also note that poor convergence will greatly confuse the test results.

See, also, web site

http://www.snellwilcox.com/

When comparing TV sets in a store, be aware that the source material fed to all of the sets may be of inferior
quality.

Conducting Tests Yourself

If you want to be thorough about examining the TV, you would need to feed test video into all three kinds of
inputs, composite (yellow RCA jack), S-video, and component video or digital video input. A DVD player with all
three of these kinds of video as outputs can be used. Dark gaps between color patches will never be completely
absent if the source is composite or S-video.

Note: Specifying "lines of resolution" requires a distance span. Video professionals use for this distance the height
of the picture as displayed on the screen. A more general distance reference is across the largest circle that fits in
the space we are talking about.

Some History

The most important requirement that led to color resolution as it is today was the need to fit the available
transmission bandwidth or available storage space. The second and still important requirement was to be
compatible with existing broadcasts which were in black and white.

With the preceding in mind, color video quickly evolved into a luminance signal with full resolution that produced
a black and white picture, together with chrominance signals that added color but with much less resolution. This
took advantage of the fact that the human eye is much less sensitive to incorrect coloration or lack of color of fine
picture details compared with loss of the light/dark (luminance) fine details themselves.

The original black and white NTSC picture signal spanned most of the bandwidth for a broadcast TV channel. It so
happens that for most real life pictures, the amount of fine detail information is quite small and also occupies a
contiguous portion of the bandwidth (towards the higher frequency side).

Color video is initially recorded or captured as red content, green content, and blue content (RGB) signal
components. At the other end of the video signal path, at the picture tube(s) or LCD panel(s) or other display
element(s) the video information must be back in RGB form.

For RGB, the three signal components must each carry the full resolution of the picture. As such, they would
occupy three times the storage or transmission channel space as a black and white video signal. The goal in
developing the complete system of color TV was to in some fashion compress the RGB signals for most of the
video signal path, in particular to use less spectrum space for the over the air broadcasting.

By formatting video as a luminance signal and two color component signals, the latter two can be carried at much
less resolution, saving on storage and transmission space requirements.
At first, some effort was made to match the color resolution to the acuity of human vision. It so happens that any
three color pairs, not just red/black, green/black, and blue/black, could be the basis of subsignals used to
reconstruct a color picture. And the human eye was more sensitive to variations of reddish orange and greenish
blue compared with other colors. Further research revealed that if the finer picture details were limited to reddish
orange and greenish blue colors, the further loss of picture quality was extremely small. With compatibility with
black and white TV in mind, the designers chose to transmit luminance, or white/black, with full resolution and
two other color pairs (reddish-orange and greenish blue for one pair and yellowish green and purple for the other
pair) at a much reduced horizontal resolution. Different combinations of these color signals and luminance produce
mixtures that represent all colors.

The orange/blue color signal was given a slightly higher bandwidth. The effect was that the entire picture had full
color for coarse details (down to two percent of the screen width, medium details limited to orange, blue, white,
gray, and black, and fine details (less than one percent of the screen width) in black and white. Viewed by itself
such a picture looks very natural although of course it looks inferior compared to today's DVD picture.

Although NTSC broadcast TV provided 330 lines of resolution, most TV sets even back in the 1950's had no more
than about 240 lines as a result of manufacturing cost cutting. To define composite video, two color subsignals
were modulated onto a subcarrier and then superimposed on the fine detail portion of the luminance signal. On the
average (cheaper) black and white TV set, interference was hardly noticed. Those few TV sets (those with full
bandwidth and resolution) that experienced problems (a silk screened picture) were often hand modified by a
serviceman who added a capacitor amidst the large easily soldered discrete components. That same capacitor, tinier
nowadays, is still found in today's TV sets without comb filters.

Click here for more on color decoders.

Digital TV Color Resolution

The necessity of reducing color resolution to fit the allowable transmission or storage space has continued into the
digital age. The most common standard for U.S. video, both for HDTV and digital SDTV broadcasting and DVD,
is half the luminance resolution, both horizontally and vertically. In other words, there is one color pixel for every
2x2 block of luminance pixels. There is one other common standard where every four luminance pixels in a row
share the same color.

If each pixel could be individually colored, there is the need for each pixel to have three values for Y, Pb, and Pr
respectively, or Y, I, and Q respectively*, or R, G, and B respectively. Twelve values would be needed for each
2x2 block of pixels. Instead the 2x2 block of pixels customarily has one value for luminance for each pixel and two
values for the shared color Pb and Pr respectively for a total of six values or a 50% savings of space. In the current
DVD and HDTV spec's each value is represented by one eight bit byte giving a numeric range of approximately 0
to 255 (typically 16 to 235 for luminance, 16 to 240 for Pb and Pr, more correctly called Cb and Cr in a digital
setting.

* In practice there have been no instances of digital video other than experiments where I and Q were used as the
color components.

Downrezzing

A controversy involving high definition TV has to do with picture quality versus copying and piracy of video
material. One proposal called for the deliberate cutting of resolution for all HDTV material except when delivered
via certain encrypted and sealed video signal paths.

But cutting resolution digitally often adds problems of its own. Suppose HDTV with 1280 luminance pixels and
640 color pixels across is "downrezzed" to half its resolution. There are now only 320 color pixels across. But the
color pixels can only be centered on 320 possible positions across the screen, not 640 not to mention no constraints
on exact horizontal position for analog video.

Terminology

As 0.5 Mhz (equal to 40 lines of color resolution or 2% of the screen width) became the de-facto standard for
NTSC broadcasts, the term "coarse detail" has become equated with picture details larger than 2% of the screen
width. "Medium detail" has become equated with picture details between one and two percent of the screen width.

Notes

(1), (2) Richard Emery, see below.

(3) Charles Poynton, published volume whose title we do not recall.

References
Richard Emery, various private communications in 2001-3.

Bernard Hartman, Fundamentals of Television, 1975 (Charles F. Merrill Publishing Co., Columbus, OH)

Clyde Herrick, Color Television Theory and Servicing, 2'nd edition, 1977 (Reston Publishing Co., VA)

Milton Kaufman and Milton Kiver, Television Simplified, 7'th edition, 1973 (Van Nostrand Reinhold, NY) pp.
499-503.

Alvin Liff, Color and Black and White TV Theory and Service, 2'nd edition, 1979, 1988, (Prentice Hall, NJ)

Charles Poynton, an article posted ca. 1993 on a corporate electronic bulletin board at Digital Equipment Corp.
(Hewlett Packard.)

Greg Rogers, Video Signal Formats, (web page

http://www.cybertheater.com/Tech_Archive/YC_Comp_Format/yc_comp_format.html)

SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers)

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