Forgive if you read this on another site, but just wanted to reach as many people as possible. I know I had a lot of curiosity on ISF Calibration and never found an indepth report, so here is mine to share:
Eliab from Avical is amazing. I have never seen someone so dedicated and meticulous about his work. To give you an idea, he got to my house around 11am and left at 10pm. He stopped once to eat pizza that I had offered him. A second time for a bathroom break. And a third time for dinner that I ordered in.
I know have a tv that looks like film quality on dvds (good ones that is, don't expect Sopranos to look like film). Even my wife surprised me by saying how good it looked. Here are the steps. I am going by memory and I had my 3 crazy kids running loose so I couldn't pay attention all the time.
1) He sits down and asks me to pop in my favorite dvd. I chose Santanta because it looks awesome. He said live performances are not good because of the way they are filmed with lights, flesh tones are not accurate. I popped in Gladiator and we went through the battle scene first and he showed me the lack of detail in the dark areas and the lack of accurate colors. He then took me to scene 19 and pointed out how uniform the flesh tones were. Each person more or less looked the same flesh tone as the other. He then went on to explain grey scale and some other things which i don't remember. Basically the same thing that Video Essentials explains, but in easier terms to relate to.
2) He unloads his equipment which includes a $1500 sensor which attaches to a laptop.
3) He takes a reading of the set as it is with the sensor. The sensor is used to measure color temperature and grey scale.
4) Writes all the values down of the set as is.
5) Pops off the screen cover. I was amazed to see how hollow the tv really is. There are three guns, red, green, and white (which is blue). The guns are at the bottom of the unit, at an angle pointing toward a mirror which directs the light out the screen. He explained that each gun is made of various lens enclosed in freon. My 61swx10b has six lens per gun also called CRTS.
6) Cleans the mirror with a non amonia based cleaner first, and then with a more specialized cleaner. He used a disposable towel on each of the lens.
7) He closed the tv back up.
8) He then did an electro????? adjustment. The hitachi has two holes in the front that are covered by wooden plate. You can unscrew the plates and use the opening to adjust the lens without having the cover off. He said some tvs don't have openings and he has had to ties strings to the lens and snake them out through the cover.
9) He did the overscan adjustment using AVIA.
10) He said that I needed a very small geometry adjustment on the sides, about 1/8 of an inch. Geometry is not included and that was about another $70 so I said that I would pass on it since he said I probably would not notice too much of a difference with the geometry adjustment. He said a geometric adjustment would take him about an additional hour. He was going to use AVIA for the geometric adjustment.
11) He next did a manual convergence. Before he began he turned off all the automatic settings in the video menu under advanced. He even turned off Velocity Modulation. He spent like an hour doing the convergence. One tip you guys might want to consider. Through the front openings he stuck paper and covered the lens that he wasn't converging. He did red first, then moved on to the others. He said it was easier on the screen to see to the manual convergence that way.
12) After he was done with the convergence he hooked up his sensor again and using patterns from Video Essentials he began to adjust color temperature and grey scale. This was done using the service menu, and it was done for the warm mode. All other settings seem to be global across all inputs and modes. The program he uses takes the readings from the sensor and displays their values. Since he has a baseline of what the colors and grey scale should be at, he can begin tweaking the values through the service menu. Changing one affects the other values. Red and green he was able to adjust with no problem. With blue he was having a hard time adjusting the low end. The object is to have a smooth transition from white to black. He was able to eventually smooth it out, though not perfectly. He spent a long time doing this because he is such a pefectionist.
13) After he was finally done, he adjusted the contrast, brightness, sharpness, etc, by eye using golden eye as a reference cd. his rational was that golden eye was considered one of the first reference dvds and if could make that look good, then everything else that was reference quality would look good.
14) He was very impressed with Hitachi and said it converged well and that it had an incredible resolution of color. Of course he said that could be due to my Kenwood 5900 progressive player. We went through several scenes of Golden Eye and pointed out the details, flesh tones, and colors. Everything looked amazing, like film quality. You could see the dirt on the walls, the greenish dirty look of the water. You could actually see the different shades of white. We went back to Gladiator and now I could see the difference in the dark scenes and richness of the color. Things just popped out. In the scene where the brother and sister are in the wagon, it's dark, but you could see the details. The breast plates of the soldiers where very sharp with contrast. Red flags, and on and on.
That was about it. I am sure I got some things mixed up and probably didn't explain other well but you should get the gist of it. The differences you will see after calibration are things that you probably don't normallly see until they are pointed out to you. If you want to get a taste for it. Wath gladiator and turn off the sound like he did. With the sound off, look critcally at fleshtones and colors. Look at the dark scenes. Next time you are in the movies look carefully at the colors and fleshtones. Look carefully at the dark scenes. That is what you want emualated on your screen.
Bottom line, does calibration improve your picture? YES.
Even my satellite picture improved. The colors on a wild life Discovery show were simply OUTSTANDING!!!!
This message was edited by slocko on 01/16/02 20:27.42.
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