Television color temperature?

Shawn Murphy

Shawn Murphy

Well-known member
Can't seem to find any info on this, but do CRT televisions inherently emit in the 5600k range?

I was just running an experiment in my apartment as I have to shoot someone watching a television tomorrow and I realized that when using my existing ~3200k indoor lights at night that the picture on the screen ended up cold blue, so I set my camera to 5600k and the television picture looked fine (as expected), so, I guess tomorrow I gotta hope for a daylight interior (haven't seen it yet, it's for a friends documentary), or gel the lights.

Anyhow, just wondering if this is common knowledge or do different televisions emit different color temps or are all CRTs usually in that range?
 
with all the experience on these boards I thought I would get at least one response from someone in the know?

Well, I did my shoot today and the color of their TV (plasma?) seemed almost the same, but we decided not to try and correct it as it was passable and this was just a documentary (and a free shoot).
 
I think they are usually 6500k... so if you set for 5600k you won't be way off anyway... but a normal tv may fade a bit towards the blue spectrum if you're at 5600k in cam.

Of course tvs vary so your particular experience may be different then mine.
 
thanks for the follow up, I was wondering if it was some industry wide specification or just random based on the technology inside?

As you say though, each unit will differ to some degree, but it looks as though you won't find any that emit in the 3200k range.

Just something to keep in mind going forward, it would have been a pain to correct the existing lights that they had at this apartment as they weren't very bright to begin with, but it would have been a good exercise in setting up my own lights too if I had the time.
 
I don't think there's a modern TV on the planet that's under 5600k... and I'd venture to guess it's 90% 6500k.
 
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