«Disappointed by poor explanation, but no better choice»
I still have the original Avia DVD, but it's totally geared toward the old CRT TV sets, so I rented DVE: HD Basics on Blu-ray from Netflix. Overall, I find this HDTV calibration program quite disappointing.
My main gripe is the calibration part -- the stuff you bought or rented the program for -- is very poorly explained. The narrator races through the poorly written script, leaving you scratching your head even after two or three passes. One thing that Avia, otherwise also a user-unfriendly calibration proram, gets it right is telling you clearly what you should expect to see. HD Basics does tell you what you should see for a test, but that part is covered in like 2 seconds, and if you blinked, you would have missed it, while the narrator continues stuffing your head with lots of techno talk that adds no value to the program.
An additional problem is, only the basic tests are explained in the video, and so-called advanced tests are only briefly described in the test navigation menu, in a font so small that it's very difficult and eye-straining to read even on a big screen.
One thing that would have really helped is subtitles, or at least showing us the technical keywords the narrator is using, but there're none here. The introduction and HD in details sections are padded with useless materials, and sitting through them is an exercise in frustration -- but you have to watch most of them in order to truly understand, and properly use, the tests later!
Another problem is the menu navigation on this disc is counter-intuitive. When you press the up arrow, for instance, you'd expect to see the previous menu item highlighted; instead, it's reversed: the list scrolls up. I feel like I'm playing with one of those flight simulators from the 80s that got the pitch control wrong.
Anyway, one piece of advice I'd like to offer, regardless of what calibration program you use, is: after you calibrate, you should feel free to make slight adjustments so the picture looks right *to you*. In other words, use the calibrated settings as a starting point for finetuning. For example, using both Avia and HD Essentials gives me contrast that's a bit too low for my taste; also, the color is still a bit too saturated for me, too. So I change those settings a little bit, using what I consider ideal scenes from two high-quality Blu-ray discs: Kung Fu Panda (animation) and Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow (real-person film). The last thing you want is having a gorgeous HDTV display, calibrating it carefully, only to be wondering why you don't quite think the picture quality is right. This advice goes against what the calibration program creators tell you, but it comes from my experience of helping many people set up their TV displays, and I hope you'll agree that it's what's right to you that ultimately matters. (For the same reason, many audiophiles like to play with EQ settings, even though the "flat" setting is in theory the ideal setting because it brings out what the sound engineers had intended in the mastering studios.)
[Thursday, December 25, 2008]
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