If you are an owner of a new Sharp LCD TV or a lucky recipient of a 42 inch Samsung Plasma TV gift, home theater calibration is something that you need to do before you start popping in that new DVD title.
Home theater calibration is the process of fine tuning the details of your television unit be it LCD, plasma, or the good old cathode ray tube. See, most retailers if not all, calibrate factory fresh television to overwhelming levels and they do this for commercial purposes. Now you know.
For example, a TV store dealer would set the brightness or contrast of a TV product to high so that it will attract customers. A high contrast setting isn’t an eye friendly setting fit for home viewing. But you see, the trick worked for you. Now they had you buy that LCD TV. In reality though, bright objects attract. So to entice people to look at their new TV sets, dealers increase the TV settings of their products.
Home theater calibration is not something you do everyday. That’s why you need to know the basics of this process for you to be able to appreciate the enormousness and of course the price tag of your TV set. People who do home theater calibration are aptly called home theater calibrators. And bear in mind that this task is already considered a skill if not an art. And so there are four types of home theater calibrators: there are the professionals, the enthusiast, amateurs, and tinkerers. You may either fall on the last two.
Professional home theater calibrators are usually connected with TV store dealers, they are experts and of course they charge for what they do. An enthusiast calibrator is one who does calibrating for the pure purpose of pleasure and does it like a pro. The amateur knows little but considers the work as a hobby. As a matter of fact, he may also be doing some home theater speaker calibration too. The tinkerer on the other hand does just exactly that – tinkering.
Now for you to be able to maximize your televisions home theater power, you know how to asses yourself. If you fall on the last category, you know where to go. But if you fall on the second and the third category, you can do calibration yourself.
Alright, the most basic way to do home theater calibration DVD style is by using a DVD’s test pattern. Any DVD like those movies by Lucas Films and Pixar has a step-by-step guide on adjusting the best color, brightness and contrast. Some DVD also comes with a helpful instruction on optimizing the sound of your home theater.
You may also use the most primitive way to calibrating your home theater by using the DVE or the digital video essentials. DVE is a popular way to adjust TV brightness, contrast and color that’s been in use since the good ole days of laserdiscs. Another option is the AVIA. These two are common tools for DVD-type calibration. The difference between the two is that the DVE is techier, while the AVIA tool is friendlier in terms of navigation. Despite its being techy however, DVE remains to be more popular than AVIA.
If you want a ‘really’ optimized viewing and acoustic experience, your best resource is the Imaging Science Foundation or ISF. The guys have the best pool of video display technicians who can really crank up your system. The best thing about this is that you are getting absolute calibration beyond the sight of human eye. They can adjust important settings in TVs like pigmentation and gamma levels. Cool huh.
For the moment, the latest AVIA professional software costs $2000. Check on the internet about ISF certified technicians. Most enthusiasts however recommend the use of DVE. An ISF calibration would cost less though. But you get the idea, home theater calibration is the way to get more of your system.
