It's a Wonderful Life, Colorized

The Christmas season is full of choices. Do you brave the crowds at the local mall, or do all your shopping online from the comfort of home? Who’s hosting Christmas dinner? Is a doorbuster sale with a great bargain really worth a sleepless night spent waiting in line?

When it comes to one of the season’s most relaxing, enjoyable, and inexpensive traditions – good, old-fashioned classic Christmas movies – another important choice still awaits. Do you curl up to watch the angel, Clarence, show George Bailey how much the people of Bedford Falls really love him…in black and white, or color?

I’ve watched both versions of nearly all the great Christmas classics, and I vote for color. From the first time I curled up with my laptop to watch the colorized It’s A Wonderful Life, I knew there was no going back for me. ZuZu’s petals in their bright red glory won me over. We all know the names of the primary colors from Crayola crayons and preschool building blocks, but did you know that colors are not standardized across the many different types of displays and monitors we use today?

Photos, videos, software applications, and websites – all of them can appear very different from monitor to monitor. Why is there no universal standard? Color quality has evolved with monitors. Monitors haven’t evolved and changed at the quicker-than-lightning speed of computers, but there’s still a wide spectrum.

The bulky CRT (cathode ray tube) monitors of the 1980s and 1990s have given way to sleek, flat-screen LCD (liquid crystal display) monitors for most computer systems. They help us make the most of our available work space, and they provide a much higher quality spectrum of colors. Laptops also use LCD displays.

But it’s important to know that LCD displays are not all created equal. Gamers prefer the TN (twisted nematic) type for its speed, but they fall short in the color department by offering only 6-bit panels. Other LCD monitors have 8-bit panels, enabling them to fully display the entire spectrum of colors. IPS (in-plane switching) and MVA (multidomain vertical display) are two types of LCD monitors that display full, 8-bit color panels, making the full spectrum of colors available for viewing. IPS monitor color is more consistent, no matter the viewing angle, but MVA monitor types offer a higher contrast for deeper and richer dark hues.

We invest great energy into all our products to make the colors as accurate and vibrant as we can make them, but depending on how your system is set up and how your colors are calibrated, your results may vary.

For guidance in getting the most out of your display, no matter what type of monitor you have (and even some guidance in figuring out what type of monitor you have), the Web offers some great resources. Wikihow’s guide, "How to Calibrate Your Monitor," walks you through the process of calibration in a simple, step-by-step fashion. If you’re the type who likes to understand the factors involved and how they affect each other so you can really maximize your monitor, the American Society of Media Photographers offers an easy-to-understand guide to Monitor Calibration and Profiling on their website.