Colour Temperature
Color temperature settings are not usually thought of or mentioned when specifying and choosing a LCD CCTV monitor. They can help the picture quality, however this is usually post installation to fine tune the final image quality.
Color within a video signal is broken into RGB, Red, Green and Blue.
All the colors you see on your CCTV LCD monitor are a combination of those three colors mixed to produce the colour being displayed.
The Color temperature affects tone.
Tone has to do with the behavior of grays in the image, which are a mixture of the Blacks and Whites shown on the LCD CCTV monitor. These Blacks and Whites are also mixtures of RGB. The lighter shades rely on Blue, while the darker shades rely more on Red. Greys help to add depth to a CCTV image and also help show subtleties. If you looked a familiar image where all the Greys had been removed, there would be no shadow information and all the subtle details would be removed, this image would not have the same depth and detail as before and would look wrong to you. Without you realizing your brain uses these shades and colors to establish relationships within an object you are looking at.
On a CCTV monitor, color temperature changes the way Grey looks in the overall picture. Although initially an image on a CCTV monitor may look good if the colour settings were turned up high and the picture was very vibrant, in reality this would soon become tiring to view and would actually look much more realistic turned down. A neutral Grey that adds depth and detail to the picture provides a much better picture. The colour temperature is also used to gain the correct White balance within a picture, much the same as with stills photography, CCTV images can be effected by different environments (sodium lights etc), although most modern cameras now have automatic built in circuitry to combat this, sometimes this alone is not enough and the colour temperature on the CCTV monitor may need to be adjusted to make the White areas look White ie. the correct White balance.
