Technicolor's Color Certified Program ensures consistency across displays (video)

There's THX certification for TVs, ensuring potential buyers that they'll get solid home-theater visuals, so why shouldn't there be an equivalent for your gadgets' displays? Technicolor, along with software company Portrait Displays, is stepping up to the plate with a new standard for guaranteeing hue quality across PC and mobile panels. The Technicolor Color Certified Program will award screens that meet its requirements with a seal -- or logo, as it were -- of approval. What are the qualifications, you ask? Technicolor's spec is based on software from Portrait Displays, which works with OEMs to fine-tune screens for color accuracy. For the end user, the result should be consistent tones across all certified devices either automatically or when the Technicolor color setting is enabled for specific programs or apps. Head past the break for our eyes-on impressions.

Both companies have been developing the standard for some, even providing a peek at last year's IFA in Berlin. Recently, we met up with Technicolor's Saurabh Mathur of Technicolor and Portrait Displays' Martin Fishman to get a look at the most recent demo. The setup included several devices: an ASUS Zenbook, an iPad 3, a Kindle 2 and an HTC smartphone all displaying the same Zappos.com product page -- plus a real-life pair of the shoes on the website. With the Ultrabook's native color setting enabled, the high heels looked overly yellow on-screen, while some of the other gadgets' panels looked way too blue. Tuning the display to Technicolor's spec via Portrait Displays' software, however, delivered more accurate colors. In theory, tweaking the other gadgets to the same settings would yield identical tones, though for brevity's sake we focused on the Zenbook. The companies aren't yet sharing when the certification label will start shipping on products, but the presentation we saw looked pretty finalized. For now, check out the video demo below.