Early color quality was not equal

[old_tv_nut]

Night for day was commonly used in Technicolor movie outdoor scenes also. The main thing was to use a blue filter and underexposing somewhat to make the colors all more or less similar, thereby somewhat mimicking the human eye's loss of color vision in dim light. I have a picture in my mind of cowboys around a campfire that obviously is not producing much of the light in a scene.

Night scenes actually shot at night with enough artificial light to delineate the objects of interest look much better, even though that is also artificial.

One problem with reproducing night scenes at real night light levels is that it requires a huge dynamic range if the system must also do reasonably bright daytime scenes. No imaging system, film or electronic, can do this. An LCD display/projector with additional wide-range adjustment of the backlight intensity might be able to approach it. Besides, to be able to see the images, the lighting in the room would probably have to be modulated also; and the quick changes at scene cuts from day to night or vice versa would be quite unnaturally abrupt and temporarily blinding.

Nevertheless, as well-done movies demonstrate, a reasonable amount of modulation is not only possible, but makes those night scenes look much more realistic than "day for night". I was really pleased to see that my home setup could do this with no special adjustment beyond the initial setup when I first got it. Black level has to be just about perfect so that you avoid either cutting off the lowlights or having a "fog" over the whole image on these low-key scenes.