I am wanting to purchase one of the new Sharps 70 inch Tv 2012 model. I am unsure about other bloggers but to me of all the TV’s I have looked at Sharp was the winner. In addition I have been a subscriber to Sound and Vision when it was Stereo Review. Home Theatre when it first came out. I still don’t understand the need to to do all these calibrations and adjustments. What looks good to the reviewer might not to me. So I do like most people buy what I can afford an what has the best picture for the money. I have to admit I read reviews but I still half the time have no idea what they are talking about.
I was curious if other readers understand, and what makes you the reader buy a certain model? Can you really see a difference that will just blow you away. It’s like cables. I requested some literature from Audio Quest about 10 years ago on their cables they sent me a brochure that would require an Electrical Engineer to understand.
I have tried different cables. I listened and listened and could not tell the difference. Same with HDMI cables. I was just wanting other input about readers and what they buy and why. Please if you answer this don’t use terms that Engineers need to understand
Displays (TVs) are the only part of the audio/video system that actually have industry standard specifications.
When a director and editor are making a TV show or a movie, they use a display that is calibrated to this industry standard. You can go to any production house - any movie or TV studio's editing room - and the display will look the same!
This consistency throughout the entire industry is vital. If a director wants a certain detail in the picture to be visible, or he/she wants it to be obscured by a shadow or a bright white light, that director needs for every display he/she works on to look exactly the same. If one display shows a detail in a shadow or a highlight and another display does not, the director can't tell what the viewer is actually going to see!
Colors are also all calibrated to the exact same specifications. There is a chart that describes all of the colors we see as coordinates on a graph. You can literally describe any color that humans can see as a set of numbers. So every display that a director or editor uses must display every color exactly as described by these coordinate numbers. No matter what editing room they use, red should be red, green should be green, blue should be blue, white should be white, with no variation from display to display.
So with this industry standard - where every display on the production side looks exactly the same - the director can make the movie or TV show look EXACTLY the way he/she wants it to. The colors are exactly how the director wants them to look. The details in the shadows and highlights are visible or obscured according to how the director wants them to look. And the director can view all of these details on any display in the entire industry, and they will look the same, because every display has been calibrated to the same industry standard.
So, naturally, if you want to see any movie or TV show and have it look exactly the way the director intended, you want to calibrate your own TV to that same industry standard!
Makes sense, no?
So that is what reviewers are talking about when it comes to calibration. How close are they able to bring whatever TV they are reviewing to the industry standard? Not all consumer televisions are capable of being calibrated to the industry spec. Some TVs, no matter how much you adjust their settings, are still inaccurate.
So calibration isn't about personal preference. It isn't about what looks good to you vs. what looks good to someone else. There is an actual, definable "right" and "wrong".
There are instruments that can measure light output and can measure colors and spit out the coordinate numbers that go with the color graph. So we can measure to see whether a TV is outputting the exact right color or white level according to what is in the signal.
And, if you're wondering why every consumer TV isn't simply pre-calibrated to the industry standard at the factory, you have to realize that what we see and what we measure depends on the lighting in the room. In a pitch black room, a TV can be pre-calibrated. That is actually what the THX mode on a THX TV is - it is a pre-calibrated mode, but it is only perfectly accurate in a pitch black room. As soon as you turn on any light, your eye becomes biased by that light, and what you see from the TV is not longer the same as the industry standard.
Just think of it this way - your eye takes in all the light that is in any room. So the light that is coming from the TV gets combined with any light in the room, so now it is not just the light coming from the TV. What you want is for the light that actually enters your eye to be the light that the director intended. So you have to adjust the TV to compensate for any light that is in the room, so that the light that actually reaches your eye (which is a combination of the TV's light and the ambient light in the room) is actually what the director saw in the editiing room with his/her calibrated professional display.
In the end, being 100% perfect is almost impossible. You can never fully account for every possible room's lighting and every variance from consumer display to consumer display. But you can come darn close to the industry standard, and that is what display calibration is all about.
