ISF calibration/Hobbyist Shoot-out

[ebough]

Audioholics has done a great job in pointing out the disconnect between hype and reality in the cable industry. Many thanks.

How about now taking on the ISF calibration industry? There are innumerable posts on most HDTV forums and articles in related magazines that give one the impression that you can't get a decent TV picture without a full ISF makeover by a trained technician. I have a background in visual and color physiology. Using Video Essentials in conjunction with the Pro mode and advanced user adjustments of my HDTV (Sony KDF70XBR950), I think I have achieved a picture which is very accurate. My family, of course, prefer things warmer, brighter, more saturated, and so on. Apart from accurate convergence on CRT TVs, I think ISF calibration is over-rated and over-hyped, especially on today's digital units.

So set up a test. Similar digital HDTVs, one set up by a hobbyist with only user controls, the other by an ISF technician. See which an impartial audience of multiple observers prefers. The ball's in your court.

 

[RLA]

Hello
I just spent 3 hours calibrating a Hitachi 70DVS810 70" 3 panel LCD
It looked ok out of the box but it now look like you are looking through a window. I calibrated this using the tec service menu and my knowledge and training and education that cost me about $40,000 over the last 10 years with AVAI and user control's I would have never been able to calibrate this LCD to its full potential. I have also seen many front projection systems that were installed incorrectly by the untrained user and many that were installed incorrectly by the so called trained installer
Looking at this issue from where I stand I would say that professional calibration is not over hyped IMOHO

 

[ebough]

I suggest you volunteer your time to Audioholics to be the professional ISF technician in the shoot-out.

 

[gene]

I suggest you volunteer your time to Audioholics to be the professional ISF technician in the shoot-out.

Having witnessed a few of my staff going through the training and seeing the end results on my own display, I can personally vouch for the difference! I would venture to say most displays you can get about 80-85% via the user controls and Avia disc if you have time and patience. Knowing what to do in service menues, and even tweaking inside the TV can and will definately get you to 100% of the displays potential. You must determine if the cost adder of having a pro do this for you is worthwhile.

 

[ebough]

Gene

The real question is what percentage of people will notice the final 15% you postulate. Better yet, do actual testing to see how close the hobbyist comes to the ISF calibration and see how good your guess is. A more important question is will the general population even like it. I would suggest that many people would be found to prefer a less than "accurate" picture.

You have been a staunch advocate of objective testing when it comes to audio cables. Why are you concerned about putting ISF calibration to objective testing? Surely you, more than anyone else, have listened to endless tales about how snake-oil cables have made music sound better! Are you going to put yourself in the same category when it comes to your eyes? Pursue the truth in video.

 

[Leprkon]

I've never had a pro come in, but it doesn't really sound like snake oil...

a pro can calibrate a picture against a nationally recognized and accepted reference standard. he is working with finite adjustments, not some electronic theory that only works at frequencies gerbils might be able to hear or Mariah Carey might be able to produce... a cable manufacturer has no such reference standard, and in many cases, there are no changes that could be measured or heard.

if you can see the quality of the picture change to the way you want it to be, that's a service you ought to be able to buy... I really wouldn't want my mom, for example, to have to run a 64 point blue/red gun alignment. the only thing would be if the pro should return to do a quick tune for no charge once the set had a chance to get burned in.

 

[gene]

Pursue the truth in video.

That is why we recommend ISF calibration or having a pro calibrate the display. So the picture is more accurate as established standards in video. Audio cables are different, since there are no standards, only bogus claims that are easily disproven.

I have done the test. I calibrated my own display via user controls and Avia, and then had one of my ISF trained staff recalibrate it, and there was a significant increase in color accuracy, contrast ratio, and picture detail. At first I felt the image was too soft, until I really started paying attention to image details and how the picture was supposed to look.

Perhaps take a look at the article we did on Grayscale Calibration.

 

[ebough]

I applied the term "snake oil" to cables not ISF calibration. I also limited the discussion to digital TVs because I agree that only a technician can deal with convergence problems on a CRT TV. The real issue is how much improvement an ISF calibration can make on a digital HDTV which has been user-tuned by a competent person. People with a crummy unit out of the box and no technical skills whatever clearly need help. A separate issue is that some people may not like the image on a set which has been calibrated perfectly to ISF standards. They might prefer the image warmer, brighter, more saturated, or whatever. What do you say to someone who has spent $200 to make a moderately good image better and then doesn't like the result? That they have bad taste or are too ignorant to know what is correct? I would think that this is an issue which the ISF calibration industry would actually want to address--or, then again, maybe not. I just don't think people should be hyping indiscriminate ISF calibration as the only way to have a pleasing--and pretty accurate--video image.

 

[gene]

Not sure who is hyping ISF, but I agree, its not for everyone. And yes, I also agree its needed more for CRT displays than digital, however you overlook front projector and the fact few consumers really can set them up correctly. It pays to higher a pro at that point. Usually a good installer is ISF certified and has excellent experience installing and calibrating a front projector system. I know when I build my new home theater room in 6 months I will be calling on Ray

 

[plhart]

ISF is calibration to a standard, not individual taste

"A separate issue is that some people may not like the image on a set which has been calibrated perfectly to ISF standards. They might prefer the image warmer, brighter, more saturated, or whatever. What do you say to someone who has spent $200 to make a moderately good image better and then doesn't like the result? That they have bad taste or are too ignorant to know what is correct? I would think that this is an issue which the ISF calibration industry would actually want to address--or, then again, maybe not. I just don't think people should be hyping indiscriminate ISF calibration as the only way to have a pleasing--and pretty accurate--video image."


I've got an article on the backburner now regarding hearing and how differently our individual brains may assess what "the best sound" is versus what we've always been told is "the best sound" definition. Since the early days of hi-fi we've been told that the if we can achieve a flat frequency response of 20Hz to 20kHz, because these are the generally accepted limits of human hearing, then we'll have "the best sound".

Well that definition has had some corollaries added to it over the years which go something like 20Hz to 20Khz ±0.5dB with "inaudible distortion". This is the standard of judgment for home reproduction of audio. Past this simple definition there are literally thousands of other qualifications put on the definition.

Video standards are actually much more defined than those in audio. The NTSC published standards in 1953 for exact colors of red, green, blue etc. It is these standards which ISF calibrators are taught to emulate as best they can on display devices which themselves may have, for instance, inaccurate color decoders or LED's just off the prescribed color of green.

The bottom line is that ISFers cannot possibly know what color shift may be more pleasing to any given individual. They can and should only attempt to calibrate an imperfect display device as close as is possible to a recognized standard. Once that calibration is set as accurately as possible the settings can be noted and given to the set's owner. The owner can then be shown how to use controls available to him/her to tune away from the set's "best case" calibration.

Re: "hyping indiscriminate ISF calibration as the only way to have a pleasing--and pretty accurate--video image"; I have not seen it said that ISF calibration is the only way to have a pleasing picture. What I have always seen in print and was taught when I went through ISF was that we were being taught how to calibrate to an NTSC standard. That is all.

 

[djoxygen]

As others have pointed out, NTSC/SMPTE have set out very specific, quantified standards that ISF calibrators are adhering to when doing their work.

My day job is with a company that does pro video/film work (among other things). When we create visual content for our clients, we use reference monitors that are fairly close to those standards. I will go out on a limb and say that, unless you're watching a lot of home movies, 99% of the program material you watch was also produced on reference-calibrated monitors.

Now it is not unreasonable to speculate that some people might like their pictures to be more saturated, "warmer", brighter, etc... TV manufacturers obviously believe this is the case since most of them ship their sets from the factory with the brightness *cranked* so they stand out (or at least don't get lost) on the video wall at BB/CC-style electronics warehouses.

In the audio world it has long been proven that, if asked about the subjective quality of program material that is identical in all ways except that one is louder, humans will almost always "prefer" the louder one. I would guess this holds true for video to some extent as well.

After my first experience with a hobbyist-level "calibration" DVD, I had to retrain my brain to the darker picture (my Hitachi CRT RP will go to 100 on the brightnes and contrast with little if any discernible blooming). It took a few months, but now I understand why brighter isn't necessarily better.

In my teenage years, I thought the loudness button on my stereo was the greatest thing ever. After four years of school learning about audio (well, it didn't take me *all* four years) I understood why flat response is valuable.

It is the definitely the users' choice to go with a calibrated video and flat-response audio, or to crank up the color level and heat up the tube amps. Most people probably never notice the difference, but that's probably because nobody's ever demonstrated the difference to them. I'm appalled at what I see at my parents' house, my friends' houses, the wall-o-video at Best Buy... but that's after taking far more time than anyone else I know to give a crap.

Now I have made the decision to keep my $$ and not get an ISF calibration for several reasons, but none of them is that I think I have done better on my own. I'm also not so arrogant as to think that my subjective viewing opinions are better or more right than the people Peter Jackson or Luc Besson hire to make the movies/DVDs I watch.

 

[mtrycrafts]

Gene

The real question is what percentage of people will notice the final 15% you postulate. Better yet, do actual testing to see how close the hobbyist comes to the ISF calibration and see how good your guess is. A more important question is will the general population even like it. I would suggest that many people would be found to prefer a less than "accurate" picture.

You have been a staunch advocate of objective testing when it comes to audio cables. Why are you concerned about putting ISF calibration to objective testing? Surely you, more than anyone else, have listened to endless tales about how snake-oil cables have made music sound better! Are you going to put yourself in the same category when it comes to your eyes? Pursue the truth in video.

Reading your post I gather that you didn't use any instrumentation available to ISF techs, color temp, gray scale, etc. You used the DVD test disc and your eyes.
Without any reference to a known standard, access to other service menues, you don't know how well you calibrated the TV beyond the DVD.
You don't have any idea how much better an ISF tech would do, or not do.
You may like your work, but that is biased acceptance.

Your idea of a comparison is interesting though. If Gene decides to do this, maybe you should volunteer to do one tv yourself with the test DVD, and an identical TV by an ISF tech. Then, do a DBT between the two, you being one of the subjects?

 

[Audioholics]

To be honest, the general public would very much like oversaturated, red-pushed, over-contrasted sets with velocity scan modulation calibrated to 10K. The TV industry has already done this experiment and guess how the public voted? Just walk into a Circuit City or Best Buy show floor and look around.

Or does everyone think that TVs come that way out of the box because Sony, JVC and Toshiba don't know how to make them come off the line calibrated to a reference standard?

Now is it better? No. But the average consumer has to be trained to recognize what's better. If they don't want to get a better picture, they probably won't know how to recognize one if and when they see it. That's also the same principle as to why boom & sizzle (as Pat so aptly puts it) sells so well in the high end and low end loudspeaker marketplace.

I think I just saved us all a lot of wasted time.

 

[djoxygen]

Without any reference to a known standard, access to other service menues, you don't know how well you calibrated the TV beyond the DVD.
You don't have any idea how much better an ISF tech would do, or not do.
You may like your work, but that is biased acceptance.

That was pretty much my point. Compared to the calibrated source, off-the-shelf/out-of-the-box is rotten (per BB/CC video wall), a hobbyist cal disc and user menus can get you a lot closer, but is still inaccurate. Clint nailed the argument.

To dig a little farther, the biggest problem is something that can't be done by eye - linearity of each of the 3 colors from 0% to 100%. With a cal disc you can nail 0% by eye, ball-park 100% of all 3 colors summed, but anything else is probably not even accessible in user menus and anyone who claims to eyeball the 10% increments is probably trying to sell you $500 replacement knobs, too.

I think that someone could reasonably claim to prefer a little more saturation, or some extra brightness, but neither of those subjective desires addresses the fundamental linearity problem that can only be handled by training and some relatively spendy equipment.