TV Installers Sioux Falls SD

Some may read this as a blatant commercial for SpectraCal. It is not. What follows is a short, informal report on the state-of-the-art of display calibration, what a calibration client should know and how it may affect you.

Here's the thing.

Readers of this magazine have long been about examining the best of audio and video ... ... if not for their own consumption, then just to better understand how various Home Theatre products get to be "the best that they can be". Regular readers of video product reviews in these pages have come to understand that NO display product can fully realize its potential until it has been calibrated in the environment in which it lives - perhaps your living room.

Clearly, not all display devices calibrate equally well. There are several factors that impact the end result, not the least of which is how good the "ingredients" are in the subject product to begin with (if the color gamut of the primaries is insufficiently large, no amount of CMS can restore correct color rendering). Even assuming proper set design, unless the calibrator can get to certain adjustments, the set may be doomed to remain mediocre when the availability of said "tweaks" could have made it great. That's why, before you buy, you should talk to someone who calibrates on a regular basis to get advice as to which of the new models are most "calibrate-able" (no, Webster hasn't cataloged that one ... yet).

Which gets us to the topic of Joe calibrator. As you might expect, it matters how much experience comes to calibrate your display. As we say in class, "Good calibration is 90% Science and 10% Art". The Art is having done 100 each of various make PDPs and LCDs and understanding the greyscale behavior of each and perhaps a "trick" or two to taming them. With today's proliferation of technologies (lamp based DLP. LED based DLP, laser based DLP, lamp based LCD, LED based LCD, block and edge lit LED based LCD, LcoS and Plasma), I'm thinkin' were moving to 80/20.

Lastly, even the best calibrator is limited by the tools in his hands - which gets me to the message of this month's column. The tools with which we ply our trade have gotten a whole lot better recently, which will eventually translate to an even better image on your screen - indeed, to cite the WSR mantra, "the best that it can be."

In the last two or three years both on-board and out-board products have been offered to enthusiasts (mostly through custom installers) claiming a suite of adjustments labeled CMS. Notable display on-boards LG and JVC and out-boards Lumagen, DVDO and most recently, A/V Foundry have paved the way.

CMS stands for Color Management System and has everything to do with "managing" the adjustments that impact display color and luminance. Specifically, these parameters go by the names Greyscale, Gamma and Gamut. To one degree or another, they all affect each other, so getting all the adjustments to work together, without the aid of some sophisticated soft...