| DVD Roundup March 2004
 The Best Picture Possible:
Tests Discs to Help in Getting the Most Out of Your Video Monitor
You did it. You went out and bought
that expensive, widescreen high-definition television you’ve been drooling over for
the better part of a year. You saved your pennies, convinced your loving partner, and
rearranged the furniture, all in the name of better television viewing.
The day finally arrives when your baby is delivered. You
watch the deliverymen negotiate more than 200 pounds of high-tech electronics up two
flights of stairs and through a doorway that isn’t as wide as you thought it was. Ten
minutes later, after you’ve signed on the dotted line and ushered everyone out of the
room, you load the batteries in the remote, hit Power, insert a DVD, and sit back.
You’re ready to enjoy your new toy.
Or are you?
"Factory fresh" doesn’t always mean ready
for prime time
Despite your having spent the money and done all the
research, your brand-new television isn’t as perfect as you may think. The reality is
that very few consumer sets leave the factory with properly calibrated pictures. Experts
point to two reasons for this: sales strategy and planned failure. This is why the
Contrast control (labeled Picture on some sets) on your new TV is set to its maximum, or
to a preset labeled Vivid. These settings not only make the picture stand out on a bright
sales floor, they also operate the tube or (in a plasma screen) phosphors at very high
temperatures. High temperatures in any type of electromechanical device compromise its
longevity. Manufacturers also get their televisions noticed by tweaking certain colors
that appeal to the human eye.
In the 1960s, Sony and other companies did research that
proved that the human eye was most sensitive to blue. The problem was that turning up a
set’s blue output caused human skin to look withered and dead. To compensate, red was
then "pushed" to give skin a warmer look. As a result, television pictures stood
out more on a sales floor, but did not accurately represent natural color.
Getting the most out of your investment
The first thing I usually tell people when they purchase a
new TV is to turn down the Contrast, then the Brightness, and finally to adjust the Color
until human skin looks normal. Unfortunately, it’s tough to adjust these parameters
without a point of reference. Trying to make these adjustments while watching live
television isn’t a good point of reference for color. The reference the National
Television Systems Committee (NTSC) uses to calibrate color is a color-bar test pattern,
but until recently, the only way to get an accurate color bar was to use an expensive
signal generator. Now, two major test DVDs afford users the opportunity to use a reference
set of bars, as well as other critical test patterns, to calibrate their televisions in
their own homes. They are Digital Video Essentials (DVE), from Joe Kane
Productions ($25 USD); and Avia: Guide to Home Theater, from Ovation Software
($50).
In terms of features, the winner is Digital Video
Essentials. Unlike Avia, DVE doesn’t gloss over the nuts and bolts
of video technology. It explains the history of television, and how the technology
progressed from the first black-and-white models to current high-definition examples. A
comprehensive explanation recounts the history of overscan and why it’s needed;
there’s also an extensive history of the NTSC standard.
Where DVE practically drowns the user with
information, Avia targets the less-advanced person and tends to oversimplify the
technology. The Hot Button feature, which is claimed to offer additional
"in-depth" information, contains information no better than what one could read
on a well-written merchandise tag. The experienced videophile will quickly tire of these
links.
DVE offers the best video samples. The opening
high-definition sequence of the Space Shuttle, and the collection of other live shots, are
great for judging what reference-quality images should look like. Avia contains no
reference video images.
All of the information on DVE does come at a price.
Despite a chapter dedicated to "DVD Navigation," using DVE is frustrating
-- its title and menu format did not work consistently with the two DVD players I had on
hand. Although DVE tries to make navigation simpler with different menu designs for
the main and submenus, I often found myself losing track of where I was, and having to go
back to the beginning and retrace my steps.
| Calling In the ISF Expert Even if you purchase a calibration DVD, it might require an
expert’s touch before your TV displays a perfect picture. An avid
do-it-yourselfer, I was skeptical of this. I figured the benefits of having a professional
technician tweak my set would be marginal at best, at worst a $500 lesson in naïveté.
What I experienced was an epiphany.
I contacted Kevin Miller at the Imaging Science Foundation
(www.imagingscience.com) and asked for information on ISF technicians in my area. He put
me in contact with Jim Doolittle, who, on hearing the model name of my television,
recommended Ken Whitcomb, from Calibrations, Inc. It turns out that Whitcomb was not only
an expert with Mitsubishi televisions, but had the means to reprogram my WT-46809’s
color decoder.
Like many televisions, my Mitsubishi accentuates red,
which, among other things, gives skin tones a sunburned look. Unfortunately, the home user
can’t compensate for this red push because the user-accessible Color control affects
color globally; reducing red also throws green and blue out of whack. The fix is to tweak
only the red portion of the signal, but this requires access to the set’s
factory-locked controls, and the Mitsubishi WT-46809 doesn’t permit access to its
color decoder’s factory settings. The only way to correct the problem is to reprogram
the decoder with software. Ken Whitcomb had just the equipment to do it.
It took four hours to calibrate my set. The calibration
required that my room be pitch dark so that an accurate measurement of my
television’s light output could be made with a colorimeter. Over the windows went
five large sheets of black plastic. My wife was ecstatic!
A set’s relative light output affects its
all-important gray scale. The more accurate the gray scale, the more accurate the color of
white. As in the case of red, the gray scale is not user-adjustable. Whitcomb also
adjusted my monitor’s geometry so that a straight line would be reproduced by the set
as a straight line.
When he’d finished, the difference was immediately
apparent. The colors were punchier yet more natural-looking, while the additional detail
in the image was amazing. The most blatant difference, however, was how deep the
image now looked. The vastly improved depth of field made the three-dimensional traffic
patterns in The Fifth Element absolutely mesmerizing.
That night, after Whitcomb had left, I was like a kid in a
candy shop. I rifled through all of my films and experienced a lot of information that I
had missed. As I said, it was an epiphany.
...Anthony Di Marco
anthony@hometheatersound.com |
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I found Avia’s menus much easier to move
through. The main menu is broken into two distinct sections: "An Introduction to Home
Theater" and "Main Menu." The latter breaks down the introduction into six
chapters; the DVD’s calibration section is in a separate chapter, No. 7, to ease
access.
In many cases, Avia’s test patterns were easier
to use. The moving gray and black bars in the white and black calibration patterns allowed
my eyes to focus more easily on any adjustments I made. By comparison, the static patterns
on DVE were harder to discern, which meant it took longer to get the calibration
right. Color was a different story -- Avia’s "shimmering color chip"
approach gave me a headache. Both discs include the blue, green, and red filters for
calibrating hue and tint, but DVE goes the extra mile by sandwiching the Mylar
strips in a protective frame that’s easy to keep track of.
The two discs have different opinions on sharpness. While Avia
supplies a very intricate test pattern, DVE cuts to the chase and tells the user
that the Sharpness control is best left disabled. The latter approach worked for me. No
matter which DVD I tried, the result was the same: The picture always looked best when I
set the Sharpness to "0."
The other two
Some may scoff at the inclusion of THX Optimizer in
this list, but the tests on this disc do as good a job of calibrating basic video
parameters as do the big guys. The best part is that it is included, free, with most
THX-mastered films, such as Finding Nemo and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The
not-so-good part is that you need special blue-tinted glasses, which are not included with
the DVD but are available from the THX website for the cost of shipping. Compared to DVE
and Avia, the THX Optimizer’s user interface is strictly lo-tech. The
tests are strung together tightly, giving the user barely enough time to make adjustments
before the next test appears. Using the Back button to repeat a test yielded inconsistent
results: Sometimes I was allowed to go back to the previous pattern; other times, the menu
didn’t react to my command. Getting good results required cycling through the entire
test suite at least three times.
Co-created by Avia and Sound & Vision,
the Sound & Vision Home Theater Tune-Up might as well be called Avia Lite.
For around $20, this DVD is a very good value and contains what 80% of people need to
achieve good home-theater performance. It’s also an excellent primer to consult
before purchasing components. Even the least-experienced home-theater user will find this
DVD easy to follow and understand. The number of features pale in comparison to those on Avia
and DVE, but Tune-Up explains the most important points in enough detail to
make setup informative and thorough. It’s no surprise that the test patterns and
procedures are a subset of those found on Avia. Though some might find their
exuberance irritating, I didn’t mind the hosts -- the tongue-in-cheek performances of
"Julia" and "Dave" avoid any overly saccharine tone, and the actors
don’t talk down to the audience. What I did mind was the blatant marketing slant of Tune-Up’s
"upgrade" segment. It felt like a sales pitch for specific products rather than
a reference tool. Neither Avia nor DVE comes across as a marketing tool.
A required accessory
If I were a videophile or a user who was interested in
learning more than the basics of video calibration, Digital Video Essentials is the
way to go. For $25, this package offers a wealth of information and everything you need to
make sure your video monitor is working in tip-top shape. Despite a clumsy user interface,
DVE is a great value. On the other hand, even its more user-friendly interface and
excellent test patterns can’t justify Avia’s $50 price -- especially when
you get 90% of Avia with the $20 Sound & Vision Home Theater Tune-Up.
The THX Optimizer offers some good features, but without the blue glasses
it’s all but useless for calibrating color. I’d take the $2 it costs to ship the
glasses and put it toward a copy of DVE or Sound & Vision Home Theater
Tune-Up.
...Anthony Di Marco
anthony@hometheatersound.com |
