Hagai Gefen spent thousands of dollars on a home entertainment system, but it wasn't picture perfect.
So he called in Joe Kane, who tunes television pictures the way piano tuners find the perfect pitch of A. Kane and a growing breed of technicians like him rely on their highly trained eyes to coax crisper pictures, richer colors and finer details out of the high-tech television sets anchoring more and more living rooms.
Gone are the days when twiddling the rabbit ears would tease a better picture from the snow on the screen. Although today's high-definition TVs render dazzling, theater-quality pictures, the technology inside has become mind-bogglingly complex. An improperly adjusted set can produce jaundiced, hazy, lifeless images.
Kane and his ilk make it right -- for fees that range from $225 to well over $1,000.
"Technology may be at our fingertips, but many people don't know what buttons to press," said Joel Silver, president of the Imaging Science Foundation, an organization founded by Silver and Kane that trains and certifies calibrators.
"The old technology was mature and forgiving," Silver said. "So when a set was badly adjusted, it still looked OK. Now, with high-definition, there's no place to hide."
And because images are viewed and appreciated by human eyes in lighting conditions that can vary dramatically from living room to living room, there's only so much that machines can do to create a picture that's perfect for every home.
"In a completely dark room, I can come up with equations for what colors will always look like to the human eye," said Mark Fairchild, professor of color science and director of the Munsell Color Science Laboratory at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y.
"But in the real world, you have windows, different lighting, different room sizes, and our knowledge of color perception starts to break down. That's where we need a human to come in, look at your TV and tell you why it looks funny."
Human eyes have the ability to discern minute changes in color and light, said Dr. Michael F. Marmor, professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine. "Most people are pretty darn good at detecting fairly fine gradations in color," he said.
Gefen, for instance, knew his TV system, set up in the converted garage of his Woodland Hills home, wasn't right. He just wasn't sure why or how to fix it. But he was confident Kane would be. Gefen, who has a business that makes home theater components, was well aware of Kane's reputation.
