[Deathwish238]

They teach you how to calibrate your TV and then let you do it. It makes a night and day difference as you're able to get your TV's image to be much much more natural and life like. Without calibrating a TV it's pretty much impossible to get the best picture out of a TV.

I remember calibrating an 8 year old Sony CRT and it looked amazing afterwards, some that saw it said it looked like a new TV...better than I coudl have expected. After calibrating my Panny plasma I have one of the most natural pictures I've ever seen.


That's the short version. Here's the long version if you want more info.

When you go to a store and look at TVs, you'll noticed they all look a bit different. To achieve that difference manufacturers mess with settings in hopes of making their TV look better to you. In reality, they're just ruining the picture...problem is most have never seen a calibrated picture and like the overly bright and contrasty image with huge color issues. Samsungs and Sonys for example tend to be much too red out of the box while Sharps are too Green.

However, the point of any TV is to display the material as close to its original form as possible. You want the TV to be as close to the standard in which the movie was recorded in, in our case NTSC. So using reference screens and a blue color filter you change your settings until the screens look correct. My Panny was a little too green even in the cinema mode. The brightness was too low as well. Obviously getting the colors right makes skin tones most importantly look real. I absolutely hate TVs where everyone looks sunburned...drives me crazy. You can also see a TV that's too red have pink clouds instead of white ones, quite annoying.

By setting brightness you're messing with the black levels of the TV. Too dark and you're going to lose black detail as well as vividness, too bright and you'll end up with a washed out image as you lose colors. Black levels are the most important aspect of a TV imo so setting the brightness properly is absolutely vital. It is the reason CRTs can still give you one of the best pictures possible, they have the darkest blacks.

Contrast controls white level. Too high and you lose white detail, too low and it won't be vivid enough. Setting contrast with a DVD is the hardest part as it is pretty much impossibly to get perfect without professional equipment. However, you can get it close and it makes a huge impact on the picture. Everyone likes a vivid image, so you want to get the image as vivid as possible without crushing white detail. Contrast and brightness are often linked, so you should always double check the other when changing one of them.

lol, I've started to ramble...hoped it helped






I use DVE as it's cheaper. AVIA is a bit easier to use, but they both do the same thing in the end. I highly recommend it, $20 well worth it.