What can be used to determine if the monitor is displaying any distortion over the display?

• A. SMPTE Pattern
• B. Checkerboard Pattern
• C. Color Bars
• D. Gray Scale

Answer: (A)

Detecting geometry distortion on a monitor is best done with a reference test pattern, because it exposes how the image is mapped across the screen. A SMPTE pattern is designed for this purpose: it places precise lines, bars, and reference shapes across the display so you can see if edges are straight, corners align, and spacing remains uniform from top to bottom and left to right. Any bowing, pincushion, skew, or overscan shows up as deviations from the expected geometry, making distortion easy to diagnose. Other patterns focus on different aspects—checkerboard patterns can highlight high-frequency artifacts and sampling issues, grayscale checks tonal response, and color bars assess color accuracy—so they don’t reveal geometric distortion as clearly or comprehensively as a SMPTE pattern.