by gary » Tue May 17, 2011 11:53 am
Hi Holtzman,
The level is set thus because that is the club standard, i.e. it represents 1V p-p on a standard (as if there was one) CD player.
Keep in mind you only need 8 bits to represent full contrast (i.e. black = 0, white = 255), so the level could be much lower than that even and still be displayed with full contrast.
I think the perceived lack of contrast is more to do with the 2 colour scheme, after all how do you reproduce white when you only have 2 colours?.
Now, as I have previously mentioned, I am certainly no expert in colourisation, so if you see how to recover the RGB more accurately than I am doing (I am just reversing the process of going from RGB to 2 colour, but, of course, it is not a fully reversible process) then I would be only too happy to try it out.
If you would like to try the Baird system I could implement that easily enough.
EDIT: Of course I realise you can always come up with some scheme that calculates to white = 255,255,255 - but as far as I can tell that only shifts the problem to somewhere else in the colour space, but maybe would be a perceptual improvement after all white is such an important colour.