August 31, 2011

Color Calibration for Home Theaters

Electronics stores often run the same video agenda to a wide amount of displays to give you a opportunity to rate the picture capability of each. Step back a few feet and you will see a primary unlikeness between the colors represented. Some look great and some look awful, and it is not always the capability of the Tv that is to blame.

Often, the Tv needs to be calibrated to its environment for the best performance. stores are notorious for turning up the color and image brightness to make the displays more eye catching - image capability isn't usually their biggest concern.

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Calibrating Your Home Theater Television Will:
Let you see movies as the Director intended Improve the shadow and highlight details improving the realism of the movies you watch Improve your total viewing experience Give you the pleasure of knowing that your new television is working at its optimum settings.

How Do You Get the Best picture from Your New Tv?

Assuming you have managed to make a purchasing decision and are now the owner of a new Plasma, Lcd, or Rear angle television, what next? Doesn't the facility adjust the settings properly? Should you just play nearby with the settings until you get frustrated and quit?

Factories have a range of tolerances that are thought about accepted for capability control. They have to weight the cost of thought about tuning each unit against the profits they will make selling them. The settings you get will be acceptable, but may not be the best capability that the television is capable of displaying. When you start spending thousands of dollars on a television, you want to see the capability you paid for. Also, the manufacturers have no idea of the source of your Tv signal or what Dvd player, cables, and other devices are in your home theater system. All of these things impact your television's performance.

Getting the best capability from your television can be difficult. If you don't understand how to calibrate your television, you are likely going to make things worse and not better. Television output facilities have teams of engineers who are specially trained to calibrate the pictures on the monitors they use. This ensures consistency between separate monitors and accuracy when displaying the image in the video signal. They have extra test patterns that they display and very exact processes they employ to get the job done. It is a very technical task with a steep studying curve.

For the Anti Do-It-Yourselfer

Hire a Isf certified calibration technician to come in and tune your system. This will cost you a few hundred dollars. If you have already spent thousands on your home theater, it will be well worth the extra few dollars. The technician will not only have all the tools and training to do the job right, he or she will also have a professional relationship with the major manufacturers which will likely give them passage to adjustment settings that are inaccessible to the consumer (usually to keep you from ruining the set while fiddling with the controls.)

If you want to hire a technician, visit the Imaging Science Foundation website and use their directory to find a technician near you.

For The Hands-On Home Theater Owner

If you would like to do the calibration work yourself, there are two ways to go about the process. Purchase a set of calibration patterns on Dvd and spend a few days on the Internet researching how to use them and in what sequence you should make your adjustments, or Purchase a computer software and hardware container that will guide you straight through the process.

There are a amount of Dvds available with sets of audio and video test patterns. The Avia Guide to Home Theater and Digital Video Essentials are both easily available on the web. Read the reviews and see which you like best. As for researching the process, I suggest you start by visiting the Imaging Science Foundation website and reading straight through their online resources.

On the software/hardware side of things there is the Colorvision Stv100 Spyder Tv Colormeter. This container is a composition of hardware, software, and a Dvd with test patterns. You setup the software on your Pc, connect the colorimeter device to the Usb port, stick the colorimeter on the television screen with the attached suction cups, and display the test patterns from the Dvd on the Tv. (Unless your Pc is next to the television, you will want to have a laptop for this process.) The software will analyze the data coming from the colorimeter and give you instructions for the contrast, brightness, color, tint, and color climatic characteristic adjustments you will need to make to optimize your television picture. It removes the guess work from the process by giving you scientific measurements of you television picture to work from.

The Colorvision Spyder Tv Colormeter also gives you a complete record of the changes you make for hereafter reference.

No matter which formula you choose, you owe it to yourself to calibrate your home theater ideas to contact the full range of capability it is capable of - you paid for it!

Color Calibration for Home Theaters