How To Calibrate Your HDTV On A Budget

414RMV73TPL._SL500_AA280_.jpg Anyone who's ever bought an HDTV knows that once you bring it home, the picture tends to look a little different in your living room than it did on the store's shelves. That's because manufacturer's adjust the blue, green and red color settings, emphasizing the blue, in order to produce a super bright, pop-out-at-you image calibrated for shelf display. Your living room environment is different though, typically a lot brighter, making a super-bright image less than optimal for high-def TV viewing.

It can be fixed though. Big-box retailers such as Best Buy offer home calibration services, but charge you $300 arm-and-leg. Yeah, they do a great job and will have your picture about as optimized as it can get for the environment it's in and the expectations you have, but there are cheaper, do-it-yourself ways that do a comparable job.

Low tech and relatively low cost solutions include buying ultrasuede curtains to keep out some of the outdoor light, painting the walls a dark color, or even something as simple as putting the TV 3 times its diagonal screen measurement away from you and at eye level.

Higher tech and more effective solutions include using the THX Optimizer feature found on many DVD titles, which allow you to calibrate your set specifically for the movie you're watching with the help of a pair of blue-lensed Optimizer glasses. Calibration DVD's such as Monster's HDTV Calibration Wizard ($30), Digital Video Essentials' High Definition ($35), and the Avia II are also extremely effective and easy on the pocketbook.

If you're willing to spend a little more money, Datacolor's SpyderTV, priced at $173, uses suction cups attached to your HDTV screen and attached to your computer by USB cable to transmit information that tells you how to adjust your color, tint, and contrast levels. In the end, just know that your screen needs to be calibrated once it's set up in your home, and you don't have to spend a ton of cash, or have a ton of technical knowledge to do it.

Via The New York Times

April 16, 2008

How To Calibrate Your HDTV On A Budget