Digital Video Essentials HD Basics
May 2008 Reviewed by: Doug Blackburn Format: Blu-ray	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Finally, a test/setup disc for the Blu-ray format! DVE: HD Basics isn’t video-imaging veteran Joe Kane’s first test/setup product. A Video Standard was released on Laserdisc in 1988. This was a techie tour de force, but it wasn’t particularly accessible to movie and home-theater enthusiasts without professional training. It wasn’t until 1996 that the first Video Essentials product was released, still in Laserdisc format. Not too long after that, the existing analog program was converted to digital and released on the fledgling DVD format. Several years later an all-new, all-digital version was produced on DVD. The first high-def Digital Video Essentials product was released last fall in HD DVD combo-disc format, well ahead of the Blu-ray Disc because of the difficulties Joe Kane had getting his Blu-ray version mastered and produced.

DVE: HD Basics is clearly intended to educate unskilled but eager-to-learn HDTV enthusiasts about getting more out of their high-def video displays. Menus present sections of the disc in a logical hierarchy. When you start the disc, the first thing you see is a simple menu with the question: "What would you like to do?" Your choices are Basics, Calibrate, or Just the Test Patterns. Excellent graphics, many with animation, clarify complex topics without having to go into endless detail. The "HD Video Calibration" feature runs for 26 minutes and covers using all the basic test patterns to properly set your HDTV's menu controls.

Once you are comfortable with the concepts and theory of HDTV there are separate sections where you can use the Basic Video Patterns, Audio Test signals, and Advanced Video Test Patterns. These are all presented with no narration, though basic information about using each pattern appears in text on the menu selection screen before you select the pattern. Most video test patterns are presented in 1080p, but there are some in 720p also. The beauty of this version of DVE is how easy it is to access these more "expert" sections without getting bogged down in menus or presentation materials you don’t need or want.

The DVE: HD Basics package includes a card with red, green, and blue filters mounted in it. This is used for checking the color control setting on your video display. The disc explains how to use these filters. The fold-out DVE booklet has four pages of info about connecting components to your system, two pages of disc-player setup suggestions, and three pages listing the disc contents. A more detailed DVE: HD Basics document is referred to as being downloadable from the Digital Video Essentials website, but as of our submission deadline, this document had not yet been posted.

I had a 34-year technical/engineering career with the world’s largest consumer and professional imaging company. Yet, to this day, it is impossible for me to setup any video display by eye alone as well as I can when using DVE: HD Basics. For $29.95 (or less), you can get enough of an improvement in image quality that you would have to have spent hundreds of dollars more on your HDTV just to come close to what can be accomplished with this disc. And even then, the display calibrated with this disc might still produce better images.

However, while DVE: HD Basics will make it possible to achieve significantly better images than you can achieve without it, professional calibration will produce even better image quality. Consider DVE: HD Basics the minimum you should do to get more from your video display. It can even be used for periodic fine-tuning of a calibrated video display. But using instrumentation reveals things about the performance of video displays you just can’t find or fix by eye. Thus, even if you are going to get a professional calibration, you’ll still want to have a copy of DVE: HD Basics. This is one disc that should be in everybody’s collection.

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