England vs Greece, BBC1

Hi,

Obviously alot of people tuned into the football yesterday afternoon, and I just have a quick question regarding the picture quality on BBC1 thro NTL.

The match was played in bright sunlight, which may have had a bearing as part of the pitch was in shadow, but did anybody notice the 'brightness' level of the pitch/players keep changing quite noticeably whilst the camera was panning round the ground???? Or was it just me (maybe I have a problem with my panny TX32-PK20). I have AI and P-NR both switched off, and flicker reduction is off too.

Would appreciate anybodys comments on this

Thanks....

I imagine the brightness change would have been the work of a harrassed BBC bod trying to keep the picture so we could all see what was going on.

my (rubbish) tv without auto anything showed exactly the same thing.

so relax - and plan a trip to ireland to watch the gmes next summer in case they don't sort out UK rights....

Chances are it was caused by a slow aperture change in the TV camera which tended to wash out when panning from shadow to sunlight, and darken when panning from sunlight to shadow. The BBC use top drawer hardware so I can only imagine the camera was poorly set up or had a fault, either way it was p*ss poor for such a high profile sporting occasion.

By the way, I watched it on a neighbours lcd projector (Sony VPL-VW10HT) on a 7' screen in a darkened room and saw the same problems, so your crappy TV is actually perfectly OK.

There was nothing wrong with either the Beebs kit, or yours. The problem is a feature of any type of photography. The latitude of CCD based cameras, is much better than film, but even so, they can only record a certain range of brightness levels. In this case, when the camera was correctly exposing the shadow are of the pitch, the highlight section, where the sunlight was, was outside the range of the CCD.
It's just one of those things... usually there is a more general and even light falling on the grass, usually due to the floodlights being on, to fill out the shadows sufficiently......maybe that is where the fault lies, with Old Trafford skinmping on the leccy bills!!

django

[nwebb]

Same problem watching it on Sky Sports thru satellite. I agree, they should have switched the floodlights on!

Django,

Can't argue with what youre saying, if the camera is metering on the area of the pitch in shadow then an adjacent area in the same frame that is bathed in sunlight will be 'overexposed'. But, when the camera is panning from shadow to sunlight the amount of time the camera took to compensate for the change in light level was way too slow. Jesus, my digicam does the job in a fraction of the time.