D.2.4 Measures of Conformance
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### D.2.4 Measures of Conformance

As an example, a bar pattern with 32 optical densities was printed on transmissive media (film). Beforehand, the printer had been set up to print over a density range from 0.2 (Dmin) to 3.0 (Dmax) and had been pre-configured by the manufacturer to use the Grayscale Standard Display Function, converted by the manufacturer into the table of target density values vs. P-Values described earlier.

The test pattern that was used for this was an 8-bit image consisting essentially of 32 horizontal bars. The 32 P-Values used for the bars were as follows: 0, 8, 16, 25, 33, 41, 49, 58, 66, 74, 82, 90,99, 107, 115, 123, 132, 140, 148, 156, 165, 173, 181, 189, 197, 206, 214,222, 230, 239, 247, 255.

For a given film, the 32 bars' optical densities were measured (near the middle of the film), converted to Luminances (using the standard parameters of light-box Luminance and reflected ambient light described earlier),and converted to Just-Noticeable Difference Indices by mathematically computing j(L) from L(j), where L(j) is the Grayscale Standard Display Function of Luminance L as a function of the Just-Noticeable Difference Index j. For each of the 31 intervals between consecutive measured values, a calculated value of "JNDs per increment in P-Values" was obtained by dividing the difference in Just-Noticeable Difference Index by the difference in P-Values for that interval. (In these calculations, density, L, and j are all floating-point variables. No rounding to integer values is done, so no truncation error is introduced.)

In this example, the film's data could be reasonably well fit by a horizontal straight line. That is, the calculated "JNDs per increment in P-Values was essentially constant at 2.4. A mathematical fit yielded a slight non-zero slope (specifically, dropping from 2.5 to 2.3 as the P-Value went from 0 to 255), but the 0.2 total difference was considerably smaller than the noise that was present in the 31 individual values of "JNDs per increment in P-Value" so is of doubtful significance. (The "noise" referred to here consists of the random, non-repeatable variations that are seen if a new set of measured data (e.g., from a second print of the same test pattern) is compared with a previous set of measurements.)

No visual tests were done to see if a slope that small could be detected by a human observer in side-by-side film comparisons.

Incidentally, if one considers just the 32 original absolute measured densities (rather than differential values based on small differences), one finds, in this case, quite reasonable agreement between the target and measured optical densities (within the manufacturer's norms for density accuracy, at a given density). But if one uses any metric that is based on differential information over small intervals, the results must be considered more cautiously, since they can be strongly affected by (and may be dominated by) various imperfections that are independent of a device's "true" (or averaged over many cases) characteristic behavior.

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