TV Picture: What Does "Calibration" Mean???

Most of them now have user color temperature adjustments. That will be at t he highest setting when it leaves the factory.

The LEDS are chosen for the high blue output because to use the display to lower the color temperature is much cheaper than to raise it. In terms of b rightness. And it does not react as well as CRTs did. But in both, if you D O want higher color temperature you need to boost the blue. Reducing the re d and green is not the right way to do it.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote: "Most of them now have user color temperature adjustments. That will be at the highest setting when it leaves the factory.

^Correck!^ :)

Folks I have come to the conclusion that the majority of people don't even know these new-fangled panels HAVE settings or a menu under which settings can be found. I'm dead serious. And they live with their TVs looking like cartoons not knowing that they are getting only 5% of out of their investment's potential.

A damned SHAME, as is their attitude when I offer to make it better:

"It's fine the way it is"

"It's brand new; that's the way it's supposed to look."

"LEAVE IT ALONE"....

And that's the toughest part of being a calibrator - or at least, someone who knows better.

Somewhat like the people who leave their stereo at flat response. the bass and treble controls are there to be used. Every recording is not perfect and every speaker is not perfect, especially in a real room.

How the shoot these new movies and shows annoys me. Color effects, the blacks are green or whatever. And I know it is them because if you turn the color all the way down you have a good greyscale. Camera angles shifting like a damn toddler had the camera.

And geometry ? Either it is letterboxed, cropped on the sides or overscanning because they haven't gotten their aspect ration shit together.

On Saturday, October 24, 2015 at 12:54:22 PM UTC-4, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote :

s and treble controls are there to be used. Every recording is not perfect and every speaker is not perfect, especially in a real room.

acks are green or whatever. And I know it is them because if you turn the c olor all the way down you have a good greyscale. Camera angles shifting lik e a damn toddler had the camera.

ning because they haven't gotten their aspect ration shit together.

___ Actually jurb, the default TV settings are like having the bass & treble jacked fully clockwise, or the graphic equalizers set like smileys - middle sliders down, and sliders toward the ends higher and higher.

As far as aspect ratio is concerned, 16:9 or "screen fit" will accommodate most viewing scenarios. I'm really annoyed by those who insist on stretching 4:3(old fashioned TV) pictures to fit their wide-screen HD theater, so J.J. from "Good Times" looks wider than superintendent Bookman. LOL!

For those that don't think calibration - or at least proper adjustment of the basic six controls - is important:

How do you prefer your Kidman? ...

yes, and there are different types of phosphor. Some look better than others where color temp matters.

Cyndrome Leader wrote: "yes, and there are different types of phosphor. Some look better than others where color temp matters. "

And there are adjustments available on most panels to being all of those into grayscale spec.

Adjustable backlight color temp on cheapo televisions?

I've seen color corrected LED backlights on high end computer displays. I use a 4k Eizo that has this feature, it's not tunable but the color temp has a few settings and only the highest one is harsh blue, as it should be (and also not used as it looks bad, like televisions at the store).

Not the backlight - the overall picture.

"harsh blue, as it should be" ???

Are you serious?

exactly. If you try to compensate for a horrible backlight you're going to lose the full gamut the display should have been able to show.

Serious. 10k color temp looks bad on a good monitor, and that temp is even far exceeded by cheap displays.

"exactly. If you try to compensate for a horrible backlight you're going to lose the full gamut the display should have been able to show. "

And this is where colorimeter-based calibration comes in. By adjusting the bias/gain, and the RGBs, you can compensate for any backlight flaws and maintain correct color gamut.

"Serious. 10k color temp looks bad on a good monitor, and that temp is even far exceeded by cheap displays. "

So given that, and your first quoted statement above, would you still keep the OOB settings on a consumer display, or would you at least attempt to get the basic settings closer to standardized positions?

We bought our first flat screen this year when a CRT finally died. (still have 3 more in the garage, can't get rid of them)

I did not know there were settings until I read this thread.

I do recall the colors didn't look quite right at first, but ....sigh......we got used to them.

So you're making a good case for some adjustments. Is this stuff in the owner's manual?

On Saturday, October 24, 2015 at 12:54:22 PM UTC-4, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote :

s and treble controls are there to be used. Every recording is not perfect and every speaker is not perfect, especially in a real room.

Well - this is a horse of an entirely different color.

First, a confession: Due to this being one of the facets of my hobby, I hav e no less than seven (7) functioning, dedicated audio systems in play. Four are in my "radio room" one in the living room, and the most serious one in the library. The seventh is at our summer house, and is primarily a weeken d warrior. Speakers range from AR3a to Magnepan MG-IIIa, and include both R evox and AR sub-sat systems as well as vintage AR M5s. So, the vice has bee n well-established. The house is a center-hall colonial with 10' ceilings, plaster walls, hardwood floors and lots of wood trim. Room sizes vary from

a) I have found that with some care and a very understanding wife, speakers may be placed in about any room without needing equalization. b) Getting a good soundstage - which is emphatically NOT a single point - i s a little more difficult, but not impossible - and why I favor placing spe akers on the long wall of a room, not the short wall. c) There are times when I will use the bass/treble/midrange controls on my pre-amps - but that will be specific to a recording, not a general setting. I do also own an equalizer - but in the last 10 years, it has seen use onl y to the extent that I make sure it is working properly. And I also own a C itation 17 with equalization built-in, nice but not much used. d) I find that adequate power such that one may achieve substantial volume without the threat of clipping is far more useful to good sound than any so rt of 'shaping' applied to the signal. I have a (very) few recordings with a peak-to-average of very nearly 30dB, such that 'enough power' is not an i dle expectation.

Things that are 'there to be used' are often not of much use if any thought is applied.

Peter Wieck Melrose Park, PA

No. here is a reason there were no LED LCD TVs in the past. They could not get the color right because the wavelengths they needed were simply not the re. So they built those HV supplies and used those CCFLs with their own spe cial phosphor. Well it isn't all that special.

The LCD panel has to separate the colors, and there are only so many effici ent ways of doing that. You have to have the colors it needs. The spectral output has to be right and matched to not only the panel, but the circuitry . The days of the 90 degree color demodulation angle being the last word ar e over. Red is not really red, green is not really green and blue is not re ally blue. At least as defined by the old standard. They can do whatever th ey want now, and DLPs took to using seven colors. Like having a seven gun C RT. Try just demodulating I and Q now. (the original red and blue signals, kinda)

One thing though, if you DO deem it that important, what is your reference ? A piece of paper ? Lit by what ? The way I see it you would need a lightb ox such as used for color camera calibration. If you do not have that, how do you know what is white ?

You an AKer ?

Anyway, in response, speakers run 5, 6, 7 dB off, microphones about the sam e. Amps, tuners, whatever, consider them good within 3 dB. And people are a fraid to use tone controls ? Where is that in the Bible ? Where is that in the Constitution ?

What's more, when turned all the way up that bass control is doing what it is supposed to do. Or all the way down. It was endowed by its creator with that ability. It is your free will to use it or abuse it. Like a gun, well at least as far as some woofers are concerned but they are just paranoid...

Bose had no shame in using a permanent EQ. Neither did I. Years ago I had s peakers used to have a small woofer and like an 8 or 10 inch passive radiat or which I replaced with a four ohm woofer.

It was not good, but using the full range off a Soundcraftsmen ten band EQ I got them to sound good. And when I played a few other things on them I st arted liking them better and better. Damn that bass was smooth.

The settings were 31 Hz at +max, 62 at 0, 125 Hz at -max (min) and the rest gradually up to the center from there to about the sixth band. It sounded fantastic, but was inefficient as hell. First of all it was 2.3 ohms, poiso n to at least half of the amps known in existence, or not actually...

The lights dimmed when I cranked these babies up. Eventually they became th e rear channels in my quad system. Fed them with a supposedly low power San sui 771. I scoped it once and don;t remember the reading but it was well ov er a hundred a channel into that 2.3 ohms. The front was the Marantz 4270 r unning into speakers I put together. A 12 inch three way system, decent dom e tweeters, noting fancy ad did not sound perfect, but I had an EQ for them as well. Separate EQs for front and back. Yup.

Once set, I believe the sound was damn hard to beat. Nobody did back then, at least in the current crowd. And I had it with the Advent five foot silve r screen job with the mirror out front, AND MINE WAS CALIBRATED. Someone ha s just changed all three CRTs but it had another problem nobody could fix. Nobody else that is.

You look at these things and the picture is trapezoidal, the convergence is shit, you can't read the letters sometimes because it is so bad. Not mine. Mine was perfect. Convergence within a raster line width everywhere on the screen. I figured out a little design defect that was keeping the others f rom having that. It was radiation from one wire to another, polluting one o f the waveforms going to the convergence waveform board. It caused an error at the right side and most people just made it overscan, not me. On a five foot diagonal screen my overscan was less than an inch on each side. Now r emember how long ago this was. Your TV picture got smaller when your fridge started not long before that.

I wouldn't mind having one of those old sets now. Not that I have anywhere to put it, but if I did...

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote: "One thing though, if you DO deem it that importan t, what is your reference ? A piece of paper ? Lit by what ? The way I see it you would need a lightbox such as used for color camera calibration. If you do not have that, how do you know what is white ? "

This will be my last reply to you, since it seems your mind is clearly closed to TV calibration:

My ref. source is one of several good test pattern DVDs out there: HD Digital Video Essentials on Blu-Ray, Spears & Munsil, etc. There are also pattern generators out there, from Quantum and Spectra Cal. You put up the patterns, stick a sensor on your screen, and adjust what the laptop software tells you to.

And now you are on your own. I'm going to respond to someone who at least seems curious about this subject.

Tim R. wrote: "So you're making a good case for some adjustments. Is this stuff in the owner's manual? "

Welcome to the newsgroup! :)

The owners manual mainly explains how to access the settings and (sort of) what each control does.

I can get you started, but first I need to know what type of flat panel you have: LCD/LED(both are backlit) or Plasma.

For the backlight types, the first things you want to do is (1) turn the backlight down from full, to about halfway, and (2) under advanced settings, turn off any "eye candy" - garbage like skin tone enhancer, black level enhancer, edge enhancer, and digital noise reduction.

Next, get the TV out of "Vivid" picture mode. All that is designed to do is shorten the life of your TV so you can go out and buy a new one in 3-4 years(!).

Start with those things and tell me what you see. It will not be as bright as you were used with those showroom settings, but it's not supposed to be.

On Thursday, October 29, 2015 at 6:14:25 AM UTC-4, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrot e:

I did that (except I realize I left noise reduction on) and I get a kind of washed out appearance, like water colors instead of oils. I left it that way to see if I'd get used to it. My wife and daughter have not commented

- really they watch the majority of TV. But I didn't tell them what I did, I'll wait a day and ask.

What made the most difference was removing Vivid.