The new color matrix does react differently to colors than with the previous model and transfering color matrix configurations from the HD100 is not feasible. I went through several different iterations with the HD250 in order to find an acceptable compromise.

The challenge with this kind of adjustment is that the color matrix, in this case, is adjusted by affecting three groups of controls: Red Gain+Red Rotation, Green Gain+Green Rotation, Blue Gain+Blue Rotation. A vectorscope has reference points for 6 colors: R,G, and B and their complements: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. When you adjust the gain of one color you affect the complementary color as well. For example, turning up the gain for Blue increases the level of Yellow as well. The gain also as an effect on the position of colors, in other words the gain affects the rotation a bit. Rotation affects where a given color gets positioned in the spectrum. A calibrated chart like the DSC ChromaDuMonde is designed to reproduce given colors in camera. DSC checks their charts individually with a spectrometer in order to guarantee that the chart will in fact cause the expected reaction from the camera. Assuming that you have even lighting and you have done an accurate white balance, the red, gree and blue of the chart should "fall" in the right spots in the vectorscope. If they don't you use the gain and rotation controls to position the colors in the right location. Let's take a look at an example of vectorscope, this one is from the Synthetic Aperture's Color Finesse plugin, inside Adobe's After Effects:

The DSC charts are made to represent the primary colors and to provide skin tones, among other things. The ChromaDuMonde provides a wider palette of colors, 28 in this case, than the FrontBox HD that I used in the past but both charts give you excellent response and accuracy. Let's take a look at our starting point, the scene file that I used as a reference is the stock "Cinema HD24p" delivered with the camera. The following pictures are stored as PNG files in order to avoid JPEG artifacts. They have been captured directly from the camera using Adobe's DVRack (now called OnLocation) and have not been altered in any way. If your browser doesn't support PNG file please use the free Firefox. You can save these pictures to your hard disk

Now, let's take a look at another way of verifying the quality of the image: histograms. An histogram gives us a "chart" representation of color informaion distributed in a picture. Since the colors are the same for all scenes, the DSC chart, a difference in the histogram tells us how differently each configuration interprets colors. I included the histograms from both Color Finesse, which show each channel separately, luma, R, G, and B and the one from PhotoShop, which combines all channels together. Sometimes the composite histogram helps more understand the overall effect of a given configuration.