Evaluate your Video System
HQV (Hollywood Quality Video) DVD, HD DVD and Blu Ray video quality evaluation test disks by Silicon Optix can help you determine just how good of a job your equipment is really doing getting the video encoded on the disks onto your display.
You can use them to do a basic evaluation of your system as a whole or run it multiple times with different settings on the various components to see what gives the best results for your system as a whole. For example changing which device does the de-interlacing - your DVD player or your display, or trying a 720p and 1080i setting from a source to a display and comparing results. The results can be surprising and counter intuitive, and even go against the usually prescribed preferences. They aren't as cheap as you may like, but using the same disks that many review sites use for part of a displays evaluation can give you a lot of insight into reviews as well as point to where the weaknesses of your setup reside.
We do want to be clear that these disks do not offer test patterns or much in the way of help in calibration. They are solely for evaluation.
Silicon Optix is not without bias, since they do make some very nice video processing chipsets used by a lot of manufacturers and they do include many tests that are designed to highlight the benefits of these products, but they are still undoubtedly among a shortlist of disks that are great to have for troubleshooting and evaluating video processing of a complete video system. Highly recommended.
Where to buy:
http://www.hqv.com/benchmark.cfm
Well, we do want to add that after really going over these that if you want the complete HQV evaluation you really need both NTSC and HD or NTSC Blu Ray. The HD DVD and Blu Ray Disks don't have all those NTSC upconverting tests that the NTSC (or PAL) disk has. This is somewhat understandable, but hey, c'mon for the price they should give you both!
ReplyDeleteThe DVE HD DVD disk hassixteen billion patterns - altogether a much better bang for your buck.