What I have seen at Best Buy stores, though, is sometimes the cheaper sets will intentionally have the settings out of whack. Stores with a Magnolia Theater may have calibrated sets in those rooms, but you usually will not see the same model up on the wall. I don’t think I have ever seen two of the exact same models on display at Best Buy – they just don’t have the show room. For example, if your starting point for brightness is set too high, when an actual bright scene occurs in the video transfer, it will appear far too bright, and dark scenes will be washed out. All you have is some arbitrary value that’s who knows how far off from accurate.
If your TV is uncalibrated, you don’t have that baseline to start from. You can’t know what “bright” is if you don’t know what “average” is first.Ĭalibrating your TV brings it to that same starting baseline, so that everything that varies from “average” does so to the degree that the filmmaker wants.
That way, if the filmmaker wants a given scene to be brighter, or darker, or bluer, or greener, or whatever, he has a baseline to start from.
When a studio transfers a movie to home video, it’s mastered based on specific reference levels. That’s just the way that human perceptual bias works.
A spur-of-the-moment comparison will probably lead you to favor the brighter image, regardless of whether that bright image is correct or not. Once your TV has been calibrated, it may take you a little while to settle in with it and get used to it. I don’t think that would really be terribly useful anyway. Maybe you might find that in a dealer showroom, but you won’t find anything calibrated at a Best Buy. (Projectors may need to be calibrated more often, depending on usage.)Īs far as comparing a calibrated set to an uncalibrated one, you’d have to find someplace that has two of the exact same television side-by-side, one of which was calibrated. (That may or may not be important, depending on your viewing conditions.) As your TV ages, its settings may drift over time, so you may need to recalibrate periodically, but a typical TV can go a couple of years between. Once you’ve calibrated your TV, you should not need to touch the settings again unless you have stored separate calibrations for daytime and nighttime viewing in order to deal with ambient light. In the meantime, what do you do for calibration – if you do anything at all? Some day, when I find the time, I’ll write up a more detailed post about that. That was quite a rabbit hole I jumped into.
When I finally bought a house last year, one of the critical steps of building a proper home theater was to purchase and learn how to use the SpectraCal CalMAN calibration package. He continued to do this for me though several projector upgrades.
Later, when I upgraded to my first HD projector, I was fortunate enough to have an engineer friend with his own colorimeter and calibration software who would occasionally come to my apartment and spend hours late into the night dialing in my video quality. In the early Laserdisc and DVD days before high definition, I couldn’t afford to have my TVs professionally calibrated (assuming that was even available at the time), but I still adjusted my settings to the best of my ability using self-calibration discs like ‘Video Essentials’. If we home theater fans demand that every Blu-ray release be the best quality it possibly can, we should also put in the effort to make sure that our high-definition displays are fine-tuned to their optimal performance.