Chris Barnardo
June 14, 2024 at 5:32 pm
Brian, Thanks for the question. I note you asked twice. I wasn’t ignoring you, it’s just that some questions are hard to answer than others and when I have to devote time to answering difficult questions it takes me away from writing the manual, which is needed for the regularity testing, and without which, I am holding up the project, preventing it from moving to the next stage of production.
Our goal is to make the tricorder as faithful the the original intent and series as possible. So with that in mind, we haven’t just changed the colours without proper consideration. The issue with the colours is fourfold. Firstly, videos and digital cameras tend to over saturate colours in order to make the image look brighter (even wet film cameras produced images with wildly different colour balance from depending on which film stock was used and the ambient lighting conditions at the time the photo was taken). In fact as we know from issues over making Spock’s face green, films were also adjusted to try and get the colour balance right, thus further affecting the fidelity of colour translation from set to screen. Secondly, image colour can look very different depending on which monitor you happen to be viewing the resultant image. Thirdly, and probably most importantly, we have had to adjust the colours to get the best spread for our colour sensing LED sensor arrangement, in order to reduce or attempt to eliminate false results when the discs are inserted. And so, finally, as can be seen when we were being filmed by the Tested crew, the look of colours is wholly depending on the ambient light and the angle from which they are viewed. From one angle the red of the red disc looks pale, almost pinky orange, and then when the camera cuts to a different angle, the red looks instantly much richer, like a different colour in fact. These perceptual issues ripple all the way through from the Original Series footage to the way we have imaged the product prototypes, to what we can actually achieve with the sensing arrangement we have. I have taken another photo of the discs and adjusted each of the colours in Photoshop on my colour balanced monitor to get them as close as possible to the colours I am seeing with my eyes, given my digital camera brightened each colour considerably. The colours are fixed now after months of tuning with our Tricorder’s in built colour detector. However, due to the technical challenge of detecting the subtle difference between the colours with the components we can afford to put into the Tricorder, each one will have to be calibrated in the factory when it is made, due to variations in the actual sensor components themselves.
Now back to manual writing.
