What is image quality? What constitutes a beautiful image? Mr. Adachi says these questions continued to plague him for nearly three years. During that time, he held a series of in-depth discussions with people involved in creating images for TV and video. He racked his brains about what the key elements that constitute image quality might be. It was in January, 2004, that he was able to assert with confidence what this thing called “high image quality” actually was. That was at the time when the first model produced at Kameyama Plant No. 1 was completed.

“Image quality consists of four elements: contrast (feeling of depth), gradation (smoothness), sharpness and color brightness. If any one of them is missing or is overemphasized, the picture appears unnatural. Looking at it will give you a sense of discomfort, an unpleasant sensation. Consequently, I worked to balance these four elements to the greatest extent possible. I finally realized that this was how to make high-quality images.” For this reason, he refers to himself as a “balancer.”

“High image quality” is just three words, but beauty is a subjective feeling, and how one senses it undoubtedly differs from person to person. Does that mean there is one and only one beauty? Mr. Adachi answered, “I think it’s a matter of policy and it differs from company to company.” Each manufacturer certainly has what it believes to be “ideal beauty,” and it is represented in the kind of image they aim for. The image that the AQUOS aims for is “...to show the beauty that exists in the natural world as it actually is. To precisely reproduce the beauty that the creator of the image wanted to express. This is the policy behind the AQUOS.”

Mr. Adachi’s job as an image processing engineer is to make the things we see every day appear as they actually are. Is the green of leaves and the green of a traffic signal reflected in the respective colors that we see? Can the difference between the red of an apple and the red of a tomato be rendered correctly? A person depicted on the screen will not appear lively if the skin color isn’t rendered in a continuous tone. Mr. Adachi methodically checks each one of these. If the outlines of an image are over-emphasized, things that appear close and things that appear far away on the screen will stand out with equal clarity of focus. If you only catch a quick glimpse of such an image, it appears vivid in the instant in which you see it, but when you look at it for a long time, the image becomes a strain to watch. The reason is that when the human eye focuses on something close up, it is natural for distant objects to be out of focus. Adachi says that you will want to take your time in electronics stores and leisurely compare the TV picture images.

Mr. Adachi says that 90% of “image creating” know-how can be expressly stated in a manual. The reason is that the images we see on the screen of an LCD TV are all physical phenomena such as color saturation, and brightness and darkness, and these parameters can be expressed by numerical values. But there is something that cannot be expressed in numbers, and that is beauty. “This gives the engineers at each manufacturer the chance to show off their skills. They are locked in a fierce battle for the remaining 10% that can’t be expressed numerically.”

Even though LCD panels will be endowed with ever higher levels of performance in the future, that 10% aesthetic part will still remain. Adachi predicts that the era in which one faithfully “reproduces” an image will soon come to an end and we will enter the realm of “rendering” images. Here, the engineer’s aesthetic sense will become increasingly important.

“I still think that my starting point were the scenes of Nikko that I saw through the camera viewfinder when I went with my father to take pictures. The sense of beauty instilled in my by my father still serves me even now. I didn’t know it at the time, but years later, my father told me that there was no film in the camera he handed me to practice with.” Mr. Adachi laughed merrily.