Re: calibrating questions
Quote:
| Also what is the difference between someone coming to do it and having a disc to do it? |
To expand a litte on what Gregg said: A test pattern disc like
Digital Video Essentials or
Avia Guide to Home Theater will walk you through adjusting the
consumer-accessible picture settings. (And hlep you adjust your audio system for optimal sound, which can be worth the price of the discs all by itself.)
But those discs don't come with test instruments, and PC for analyzing the results and the expertise to get into the manufacturer's service technician's menu and adjust individual components to get the set as close as possible to industry spec.
I've never had any of my HD sets cablibrated, haven't had the time or the money. But eventually I will. I did have my first widescreen (analog) set professionally calibrated after I had done it myself with the old
Video Essentials there was
definitely a difference. The tech was able to compensate for some built-in flaws in Toshiba CRT-based rear projection sets, correct the color temperature and adjust the convergence. The set looked good before that. It looked great afterwards. (Well, great for the technology.
)
And Gregg is right that for most users the disc will correctly calibrate the input that their DVD player is connected to, but do literally nothing for the other inputs. And that's where most users leave it. (They just copy the same settings to all the other inputs.) A pro will calibrate all of them.
In my case I ran
DVE from two different DVD players against all of the inputs on my set. This is still only an approximation, since the output signal from the DVD player is not identical to that from the cable DVR that is now attached to one of those inputs, but it was better than nothing and it showed me that the same disc and player can produce very different settings on different inputs to acheive the same visual results.
At a
minimum you'll want to use a consumer calibration disc, just because your set will basically look like crap without it, especially on SD channels, and you picture will be wildly inaccurate even with HD and DVD sources. But spending a couple of hundred extra dollars to make sure you're really getting
the best out of that very expensive monitor does seem like a no-brainer to me, as and when you can do it.
Regards,
Joe
