When it comes to watching TV in a dark room, it turns out that Mom's advice was right.

"Don't sit too close to the TV." "Never go swimming right after you've eaten." "Never watch TV in a dark room without a light on." It's interesting how two of the three things your mother always nagged you about when you were a kid had to do with proper television viewing. When it comes to sitting in a dark room when watching TV, turns out that mom was right.

In a functional home theater the quality of the lighting is as important to the visual experience as proper acoustics are to the auditory experience. Rooms with good acoustic designs help you get all the performance you paid for from your audio equipment. Properly designed lighting, similarly, helps you get the most out of your video equipment.

So you think lighting has little to do with enhancing the cinematic experience? Imagine what it would be like if there were a bright purple light left on during the movie at your local commercial movie theater. Not only would it be pretty annoying, but it would make most everything on the screen look slightly purple. Just as bad would be if the lights in that theater were suddenly turned from full on to full off when the movie started. To add insult to injury, imagine if the lights were turned on to full brightness immediately after the movie ended. Pretty jarring stuff. Proper color and transition of lighting helps set the mood to create what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the willing suspension of belief.

Types of Lights

Because the principles of light are learned in a rudimentary manner at an early age, light is generally taken for granted. But because lighting affects both our mood and the performance of what we see on the screen, perhaps some explanation of the basics as they pertain to home theater are in order.

Key lighting, also known as accent lights, is used to define the theme and establish the mood of the theater. Key lighting produces a radiant highlight reinforced by a sharply defined cast shadow. Key lighting is best accomplished with carefully placed spotlight-type fixtures that illuminate walls, wall hangings or other art objects, as well as major architectural elements like prosceniums, curtains or columns.

Base illumination is defined as the level of ambient light required to visually appreciate and comfortably move about in the space. Base lighting is best accomplished by the use of diffusive fixtures such as up-firing torchieres, wall sconces and even traditional lampshaded fixtures and recessed rope lighting around soffits.

Conceptually, key lights are defined and plotted first, followed by base illumination. However, it is important to remember that the base illumination must sustain the theater with functional, aesthetically pleasing illumination in situations where the key lights are reduced in intensity or turned off. For this reason, it is useful to complete a lighting plot that treats directional key lighting and non-directional base illumination independently, using dimming as necessary to integrate the two.

One of the least known and least understood aspects of setting up a home theater is bias lighting. Bias lighting is best defined as a small amount of light behind any type of direct-view monitor (CRT, LCD, plasma) or rear-projection set.

Back in the 1980s, under the guidance of Joe Kane of Video Essentials fame, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) performed human reactors research, which studied how we view and perceive color and other viewing conditions. One of the findings was that watching video in a totally dark room is very stressful on the eye. Going from peak light output to no light output puts a great deal of strain on the eye as your iris opens and closes in reaction to this type of light stimulus. So it is recommended that your viewing include some sort of bias lighting within the room in the field of view, preferably behind your display device. The output should be set to about 10 percent of the peak light output of your display. This specification preserves accurate color perception for the viewer.

CinemaQuest Inc. of Colorado (www.cinemaquestinc.com) has created a clever line of home theater bias-lighting fixtures scientifically designed to create just the right color temperature necessary to get the best performance from your direct-view TV.

To prove it to myself I tried placing various incandescent lights behind my 35-inch Toshiba CRT (as well as my 19-inch Samsung computer monitor). While the lights added a small degree of visual improvement, it wasn't until I switched to CinemaQuest's Ideal-Lume PRO fixture that I finally understood what all the buzz among videophiles was about and why George Lucas selected the Ideal-Lume for use in his production rooms.

In addition to minimized eyestrain, I was knocked out by the improvement in the quality of the colors on my video screen. Blacks were dramatically deeper and there was added textural detail. While watched this year's World Series with all its great close-ups of pitchers looking for their catchers' signs, flesh tones were more accurate and details like scars and five o'clock shadows were never more resplendent.

Once you have the basics of home theater under control, don't forget about the bias lighting, as well as other types of lighting, for the best viewing experience.

John Caldwell is president and founding partner of CEBIZ, a marketing development and consulting agency for manufacturers, dealers and reps.

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