I Can See Clearly Now: A New Test Pattern for the Digital Age

The colorbar test pattern was developed in the 1950s to test analog television systems. It revealed many things that went wrong with analog video. But even though the problems it revealed no longer exist in today's digital video world, we still use it. Yet there are many things that can go wrong with digital video that "bars and tone" won't reveal. This paper describes a new test pattern sequence that visually reveals many issues with digital video systems, including compression fidelity, colorspace mismatch, chroma downsampling, field-dominance reversal, and lip sync.