HDTV Calibration….
So you’ve purchased a new HDTV and you bring it home and turn down the lights and you ask yourself “This is not how it looked in the store?!”
Well a lot of TVs today have a factory setting that sets everything really bright so that if the store puts it out on the floor with all the lights on it looks nice! But at home it can look a little too harsh so what to do?
Well you can hire a TV Calibration specialist for right around $400, these guy are very popular if you have a big projection TV they come out and line up the lens or lcds or however your rear projection TV may work, but is he needed for the new LCDs? Yes and No…
Monster Cable and Ovation (Avia) make a DVD that takes you through the steps of calibrating your new HDTV for a fraction of the price of having a technician come out! (I believe Monster is $30 and Ovation is $50). The Ovation one is a little bit more ‘profesional’ than Monster Cable’s version. The difference after calibrating is not something subtle either, you will immediately notice a difference once you put in that first disc after calibrating.
What calibrating essentially does is it makes sure that your HDTV is using the current standards for high-definition. Calibrating also includes calibrating your audio components, you can set an “optimal listening spot” therefore if you watch TV from a certain spot all the time or your seating layout hasn’t changed in 10 years then you can set the distances from the TV and speaker to optimize how sound will travel to where you are sitting. Therefore if you are sitting right next to a surround speaker it will put a slight delay on that speaker so the sound will reach at the same time the other speaker sounds reach you. Now we are talking milliseconds here, but it makes an amazing difference. I actually did this in my car and it made a world of difference (for car audio calibration it takes a different set of tools though.)
