Tag Archives: charts

Camera Test Charts To Print At Home

Screenshot-2022-05-16-at-11.11.38-1024x622 Camera Test Charts To Print At HomeWhen testing and evaluating a camera, whether that’s a digital photo camera, video camera or digital cinema camera it is always useful to have a test chart or 2 (or more). While printing a chart at home isn’t always the best way to go, comercial charts can be very expensive to buy. So below is a link to an ISO 12233 chart, a Zone Plate chart and a Siemens Star chart that you can download  for free and print at home. You will need a good printer and good quality photo paper for the best results. 

For the ISO 12233 chart I divide this into quarters, print each 1/4 and then join them back together to make a larger chart.

The zone plate and siemens charts should be printed as large as possible, but in use they would not fill the frame, perhaps only a small part of the frame depending on the resolution of the camera you are evaluating.

I have not included any color charts or grey scale charts as it will be extremely difficult to know whether the colors or shades of grey your printer produces are actually correct, making the chart invalid.

Click on the green link or the images below:

Click here for ISO 12233 Test Chart as at the top of this page.

Zone-Small-150x150 Camera Test Charts To Print At Home
Zone plate derived from Imatest Software. Click on the image to go to full size file.
Siemens-100-chart-150x150 Camera Test Charts To Print At Home
Siemens 100 radial star chart – click on the image to go to the full size file.

Stetting up video cameras without charts.

There is far too much emphasis on color charts and 100% one to one – set it up with a scope settings. Very often a 100% accurate one to one response won’t look right as the video gamut is smaller and lopsided than that of the human eye so a small amount of skewing of the color gamut can often help produce a picture that visually looks more natural. One of the very best ways to set up a camera is to use a high quality color photograph of a known scene. Shoot the photograph and look at the picture on a monitor and adjust until it looks right. This will give a more natural looking image than aligning with charts and scopes and is a technique that has been used since the very beginnings of color television. I have a scene that contains vibrant colored cars, green fields and trees, buildings and blue sky. I have a dozen large copies of this picture and use it whenever I am making camera adjustments to make sure my pictures still look natural. Of course scopes should still be used if you are making any extreme settings to ensure your images are still legal, but at the end of the day what you are after is an image that looks right too you (or the producer) and whoever else will view your material, not what looks right according to a chart and a scope.