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
Showing posts with label DVD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DVD. Show all posts
Friday, June 22, 2007
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Video Calibration - The Best looking Bikini Destination
or, how about some FREE BEER!
The situation:
You buy your lovely HD Display, take it home, hook it all up with everything else and sit back and watch some lovely HDTV programming, DVD's or new HD Blu Ray or HD DVD's. It looks pretty good, right? Well in almost all cases it could look a whole lot better. The ugly truth is that almost all TV's are pre-adjusted by default to show the brightest, sharpest picture they possibly can. Well, that does certainly sound good, so what could be wrong with that?
There are a bunch of reasons, some of which are a bit counter intuitive. Here's one, you know how you can "whiten your clothes by adding bluing for extra whiteness"? Well you can make whites look whiter by adding blue in video as well. Guess what? A lot of manufacturers use this trick to make their displays look brighter in a showroom. As a matter of fact, most manufacturers default settings use every trick in the book to make their displays (your display) look brighter and more colorful at the expense of accuracy. It may look great at first, but you will never see the movie the way it was meant to look using a display as it comes from the factory. Overly Sharpening the picture is another trick used by manufacturers to make their pictures "pop". Unfortunately, this usually creates a lot of visual "artifacts" that many people would never guess are caused by that overly high "sharpness" setting in their video displays setup menu.
It is true that a full ISF calibration will usually give you the best possible picture your display can provide, but it is not inexpensive and somewhat difficult to justify for an inexpensive display.
You could go by the settings posted on your favorite home theater forum web site. Some spudnik claims they have an even more 3D image than "supervidman1"'s settings with a "15" rather than a "7" for their "contrast" setting. Are you really going to go for that?
Well, thankfully, there are alternatives. There are Calibration DVD's which will not only give you the instructions on how to calibrate your display, but give you the test patterns to do so. Avia and Digital Video essentials will pretty much walk you through the process. It is very hard not to get a better looking picture after using these disks.
The next step up in Calibration technology is a system with a colorimeter (video brightness/color meter) and software that allows you to use it to get the best picture possible without having to use your eyes to "guesstimate" your settings. The Datacolor Spyder products are easy to use and do a great job. You can even use them to do all the TV's in your house. Do you have friends with HDTV's? Do they know your absolute favorite beer?
Read our DVD Video Calibration Guide
or, how about some FREE BEER!
The situation:
You buy your lovely HD Display, take it home, hook it all up with everything else and sit back and watch some lovely HDTV programming, DVD's or new HD Blu Ray or HD DVD's. It looks pretty good, right? Well in almost all cases it could look a whole lot better. The ugly truth is that almost all TV's are pre-adjusted by default to show the brightest, sharpest picture they possibly can. Well, that does certainly sound good, so what could be wrong with that?
There are a bunch of reasons, some of which are a bit counter intuitive. Here's one, you know how you can "whiten your clothes by adding bluing for extra whiteness"? Well you can make whites look whiter by adding blue in video as well. Guess what? A lot of manufacturers use this trick to make their displays look brighter in a showroom. As a matter of fact, most manufacturers default settings use every trick in the book to make their displays (your display) look brighter and more colorful at the expense of accuracy. It may look great at first, but you will never see the movie the way it was meant to look using a display as it comes from the factory. Overly Sharpening the picture is another trick used by manufacturers to make their pictures "pop". Unfortunately, this usually creates a lot of visual "artifacts" that many people would never guess are caused by that overly high "sharpness" setting in their video displays setup menu.
It is true that a full ISF calibration will usually give you the best possible picture your display can provide, but it is not inexpensive and somewhat difficult to justify for an inexpensive display.
You could go by the settings posted on your favorite home theater forum web site. Some spudnik claims they have an even more 3D image than "supervidman1"'s settings with a "15" rather than a "7" for their "contrast" setting. Are you really going to go for that?
Well, thankfully, there are alternatives. There are Calibration DVD's which will not only give you the instructions on how to calibrate your display, but give you the test patterns to do so. Avia and Digital Video essentials will pretty much walk you through the process. It is very hard not to get a better looking picture after using these disks.
The next step up in Calibration technology is a system with a colorimeter (video brightness/color meter) and software that allows you to use it to get the best picture possible without having to use your eyes to "guesstimate" your settings. The Datacolor Spyder products are easy to use and do a great job. You can even use them to do all the TV's in your house. Do you have friends with HDTV's? Do they know your absolute favorite beer?
Read our DVD Video Calibration Guide
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