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Comment by chrisfarms | Hacker News Reader

Some Sony TV's have this ... I like the effect during films, but I don't know why I like it... intuitively it feel like it should reduce the apparent contrast of the picture, but it instead feels like I'm watching a larger screen or that there's more going on in my environment.

I'm going to hypothesise something to do with how brains process our peripheral vision.

Anyway, not sure how much fun it would be to to run it on a monitor that has vim/consoles 90% of the time... maybe it would encourage me to tab certain syntax highlighted code to the far edges of the screen and go wild :)

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I like this effect, but not because of changes to the perceived contrast. Often people turn off the lights during movies and this always bothered me because I lose my point of reference. It actually tends to give me nausea to have the only light coming from the TV. Having some sort of light whether its this, a nightlight, or a soft light from a different room tends to prevent this nausea.

> It actually tends to give me nausea to have the only light coming from the TV. Having some sort of light whether its this, a nightlight, or a soft light from a different room tends to prevent this nausea.

Finally, someone else! People always give me strange looks when I complain about this.

Bias lighting is well understood in the professional video industry. Your intuition is spot on. These products, however, do not work like they ought to.

http://www.cinemaquestinc.com/ideal_lume.htm

I suspect this is an effect of our Foveal Vision:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis

We only see things in the centre of the eye crisply and the effective 'resolution' reduces the further away we get from this point. Thus, perhaps, the extra colour is perceived as more screen rather than coloured wall.

These actually increase the apparent contrast you see on the screen. They're especially helpful for LCD panels which have washed-out and uneven black which is very noticeable in a dark room. Having the colours match the picture seems largely a gimmick to me, but having a light surround makes the screen appear "darker". The exact effect it has is hard to measure, and attempts have been ongoing since the 50s. Here's a recent paper: http://www.scopecalc.com/image-contrast-and-surround-illumin...

There are SMPTE specs for exactly how much of what colour light should be used, and we follow them at work, but at home a string of LED fairy lights behind the screen helps a lot ;)

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