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 September 1, 2009 Spears & Munsil’s High Definition Benchmark: Blu-ray Edition vs. Joe Kane’s Digital Video Essentials: HD Basics
Why do I need to change any of my display’s settings? Don’t they set everything correctly at the factory? No. The big-box stores that sell the vast majority of front-projector, flat-panel LCD, and plasma displays usually just pull a demo unit out of its box, plug it in, and turn it on. The customer, faced with banks of moving pictures, usually assumes that the brightest picture is the best. This is why the manufacturers of these displays jack up both the Contrast and the Color all the way to 11, hoping to win the hearts and money of Joe and Jane Consumer. The problem is, when that TV is set up in your living room, it looks like Alice in Wonderland on LSD. Some of the better manufacturers offer a preset that’s very close to accurate, though they seldom label it as such. It’s more likely to be called Movie or Cinema, or something more arcane. There are only two ways to make sure your display is set to deliver its utmost quality of image: hire someone, or do it yourself. Who should set it up? The Imaging Science Foundation offers two- and three-day trainings in how to properly set up a display. Students learn how to use an optical comparator -- the minimum an ISF installer would use -- as well as other instruments, such as a colorimeter or spectrophotometer, that aid in getting a near-perfect calibration. An optical comparator costs $500; the other instruments can run up to $15,000. ISF-trained technicians also know the secret codes that give them access to your display’s service menus so they can calibrate individual settings. Having an ISF-certified technician fix your TV can run $250 and up -- sometimes way up.
Beware of technicians who claim to be able to do what an ISF tech can do but lack the credentials to prove it. Loads of retailers have them on staff, and they often charge just as much. Caveat emptor. For the do-it-yourselfer, working with a setup disc lets you adjust the principal settings, such as Brightness, Contrast, Color and Sharpness. In some cases, a setup disc will also help you decide which component in your system should handle deinterlacing and scaling. If your TV is in proper operating order and made by a reputable company -- that is, nothing is grotesquely out of sync -- a good setup disc should give you 95% of the quality you’d get from an ISF technician. Who are Kane, Spears, and Munsil? What makes them the experts? For 20 years, Joe Kane has been the driving force empowering consumers to maximize their home-theater investment. In 1989 he released A Video Standard, a detailed laserdisc setup aimed at giving consumers basic test signals and guidance in how to use them. Since then he has moved with advances in technology, and now offers similar programs for DVD, D-VHS, HD DVD, and Blu-ray. Kane also consulted with several companies, helping them design components that would help consumers get more consistent results. Kane’s Digital Video Essentials: HD Basics (DVE) was released in 2008. Stacey Spears and Don Munsil are writers who have spent the last few years enlightening the world about video deinterlacing, scaling, and processing. They’re most famous for their "DVD Player Benchmark" and "Progressive Scan Shootout" series of articles in Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity. Spears and Munsil’s High Definition Benchmark: Blu-ray Edition (HDB) came out in 2009. (A third disc, HD HQV Benchmark, was developed by Silicon Optix and the writers and editors of various home-theater publications. Given the fact that Silicon Optix’s principal product is a video-processing chip, the disc concentrates on noise reduction, deinterlacing, and scaling. Outside of evaluating a system’s abilities in those areas, the general consumer will find it less useful than DVE or HDB. HD HQV Benchmark was released in 2007 and costs $20.) What equipment will I need? You’ll need a Blu-ray player, a display, and good eyesight. In some cases, the difference between a correct and an incorrect setting requires you to get within inches of the screen to carefully examine it for quite subtle artifacts. Early editions of the Spears & Munsil disc came without a blue filter for adjusting the color. S&M weren’t convinced they’d found an accurate filter, and rather than hold up the entire project, they published HDB without one. The current version comes with the filter, and filters are available free to folks who end up with a disc sans filter.
Which disc should I get? The simple answer is both. Both HDB and DVE have similar initial setup routines and primary screens for setting Brightness, Contrast, Color, Tint and Sharpness. Using either disc will leave you with a much better picture than you started with. DVE has the most calibration and test screens, more video, several quite helpful audio-setup tips, and helpful video tutorials explaining the calibration procedure. It’s also harder to use, to the point that many folks give up before they’ve worked their way through Kane’s system. Plus, DVE doesn’t test your system’s ability to deinterlace properly. On the other hand, if you have test instruments and know what you’re doing, DVE is a very powerful tool.
HDB is aimed squarely at the enthusiast consumer. It’s easier to navigate, has sharper-looking screens for the basic settings, and boasts an abundance of thoughtful extras. My favorite feature on HDB is the Help function. Just push the Up button on your Blu-ray player's remote and a translucent panel appears on your display with descriptions of the test screen and a picture of what "correct" and "incorrect" look like. To get rid of it, just push the Down button. Although HDB is loaded with great calibration slides, I never felt overwhelmed, lost or confused -- something I can’t say about DVE. All in all, I found HDB a delight to use -- it’s simple, fast, and dead accurate. It also contains most of what’s on Silicon Optix’s HD HQV Benchmark. And for you folks searching for horizontal or vertical Y/C delay, the chroma-alignment pattern on HDB is the tool of choice. Having both discs covers all the bases. What should I expect my TV to look like after using a setup disc? Herein lies a slight rub. Remember how the manufacturers ship TVs out with their Contrast and Color settings cranked up all the way because they’re easier to sell? There’s at least a chance that, after using a good setup disc for the first time, you might feel the picture is a bit too mellow. However, if you take the time to get used to the new picture, it will reward you. Images will be more film-like and look more natural. Pictures with dark hues and shadows will have more depth and transparency. And when you cue up a vibrant, vivid Technicolor film, the image’s colors will pop off the screen. If, on the other hand, your TV was made by a company with a different marketing strategy, it might be accurately calibrated right out of the box, with all the factory defaults set at the correct positions. In that case, neither disc will provide a shocking improvement in the display’s performance, but you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing it’s right. Ease of use and quality of results: Which disc wins? Spears & Munsil’s High Definition Benchmark: Blu-ray Edition, by a wide margin. Your final picture quality will be close to identical with DVE, but HDB has newer and slightly clearer calibration screens. And though HDB lacks Joe Kane’s fascinating discussions about home theater, it makes up for it with a simpler menu system. In fact, HDB is so easy to use that it should be studied by software and DVD-authoring companies. DVE is so complicated to use that, in this regard, it doesn’t even come close. Kudos to Stacey Spears and Don Munsil for an outstanding job. Spears & Munsil’s High Definition Benchmark: Blu-ray Edition is available from Amazon.com, Oppo Digital, Markertek, and AV Science, as well as from CRT Projectors in the UK and RapalloAV in New Zealand. Digital Video Essentials: HD Basics is available wherever DVDs are sold. . . . Wes Marshall
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If $30 and an hour of your time would
vastly improve your home theater's picture, would you spend the money and time? It's
amazing how many folks will buy a home theater that costs 100x the purchase price of a
good setup disc, and then not spend the little time and money it takes to really optimize
the video quality. But which disc to buy? The leading test-disc contenders in the Blu-ray
arena are 
