isf calibration

[comeup]

Who has had it done? and how do you like it? is it necessary? I'm thinking of having it done to my Pionner Pro1140HD Best Buy is doing calibrations for $300. I checked around and that's a good price. They sent some of their installers back east to get (ISF Certified) They had two Samsung LCD's side by side one calibrated the other on standard and of course I played with the un-calibrated display to see if I could make it look as good as the calibrated display and I could not. The detail was much superior on the calibrated display.
I called Pioneer to see if it was necessary and would it make the picture better and their response was yes if your not going to change your room around. Colors, light, furniture and objects can effect the calibration settings it would have to be re-calibrated if I made any major changes in the room including paint.
I assume its more for a person that has a dedicated home theater room where changes to the room are not made often.
What do ya think?

[George Bellefontaine]

It certianly won't hurt if you can afford it, and it indeed may make a heck of an improvement. Today's front projectors by top makers have pretty good pictures out of the box that are close to the D6500 color temperature standard. I have never had one calibrated because I live in a rural area and there are no ISF calibrators nearby. I pretty much go by eye, and have been doing so since my first crt front projector back in 1990. If the gray scale doesn't look correct, or if your black and white movies look blue and white, then the color temp of your set is not D6500 and it would definitely benefit from a calibration. Doing it yourself can mess things up if you don't know what you're doing. A calibration requires adjustment of the RGB gain and RGB bias, or today I believe they are referred to as RGB contrast and RGB brightness . These controls are readily accessible in most front projectors today. I'm not sure about your type of tv. If you can make color temperature adjustment, it would be in your users menu. Again, I don't recommend trying this if you are unfamiliar with such adjustments.

[htsteve]

Well worth the money

Who has had it done? and how do you like it? is it necessary? I'm thinking of having it done to my Pionner Pro1140HD Best Buy is doing calibrations for $300. I checked around and that's a good price. They sent some of their installers back east to get (ISF Certified) They had two Samsung LCD's side by side one calibrated the other on standard and of course I played with the un-calibrated display to see if I could make it look as good as the calibrated display and I could not. The detail was much superior on the calibrated display.
I called Pioneer to see if it was necessary and would it make the picture better and their response was yes if your not going to change your room around. Colors, light, furniture and objects can effect the calibration settings it would have to be re-calibrated if I made any major changes in the room including paint.
I assume its more for a person that has a dedicated home theater room where changes to the room are not made often.
What do ya think?

comeup,

The simple truth is most TV's are not correct coming out of the box. And the way to fix this is a calibrations. However, many calibrations need to be done in the service menu. Only someone that has training in this area should mess with the service menu (you can permanently screw things up in there). Even if you can get to the controls, you still need the proper equipement to measure and figure out what the adjustment needs to be. This is where an ISF person comes in, see below.

As to the value of a calibration, to me it's worth the money. Once calibrated, your TV will look sharper, have correct colors, give better shadow detail. Simply, you are seeing it the way it should be. Looking for an ISF trained person is a very good idea. Finding one with the correct equipment is even better.

I have a 55" TV in our family room that has been calibrated. We've move some firniture in and out. It really doesn't affect how good the piture looks. You'd have to make some drastic changes in the ambient light in your room to affect a calibrated TV. The room also doubles as the HT room. So it doesn't need to be a formal dedicated HT room. I am planning to build an HT room in our basement. It will have a projector that I will definitely be getting calibrated.

$300 is a reasonable price. Make sure they have good equipement. Also, the ISF (www.imagingscience.com) website has a tech locator on the left of the main screen. You can find others in your area.

Hope this helps.

[comeup]

Thanks fellas, I was kind of thinking the same thing about the changing of the room around. I did buy Digital Video Essentials to try to get the best possible picture that a rookie could get out of the display and thought it was a waste of $20. My standard setting looked better than my Video Essentials setting, I guest if you know absolutely nothing about home theater it would come in handy, but for me it was a waste. Steve great site thanks a lot.