Electronics stores often run the same video program to a wide number of displays to give you a chance to evaluate the picture quality of each. Step back a few feet and you will see a significant difference between the colors represented. Some look great and some look awful, and it is not always the quality of the TV that is to blame.

Often, the TV needs to be calibrated to its environment for the best performance. Stores are notorious for turning up the color and image brightness to make the displays more eye catching - image quality isn't usually their biggest concern.

Calibrating Your Home Theater Television Will:

• Let you see movies as the Director intended
• Improve the shadow and highlight details enhancing the realism of the movies you watch
• Improve your overall viewing experience
• Give you the satisfaction of knowing that your new television is working at its optimum settings.

How Do You Get the Best Picture from Your New TV?

Assuming you have managed to make a purchasing decision and are now the owner of a new Plasma, LCD, or Rear Projection television, what next? Doesn't the factory adjust the settings properly? Should you just play around with the settings until you get frustrated and quit?

Factories have a range of tolerances that are considered acceptable for quality control. They have to weight the cost of carefully tuning each unit against the profits they will make selling them. The settings you get will be acceptable, but may not be the best quality that the television is capable of displaying. When you start spending thousands of dollars on a television, you want to see the quality you paid for. Also, the manufacturers have no idea of the source of your TV signal or what DVD player, cables, and other devices are in your home theater system. All of these things impact your televisions performance.

Getting the best quality from your television can be difficult. If you don't understand how to calibrate your television, you are likely going to make things worse and not better. Television production facilities have teams of engineers who are specially trained to calibrate the pictures on the monitors they use. This ensures consistency between different monitors and accuracy when displaying the image in the video signal. They have special test patterns that they display and very specific processes they employ to get the job done. It is a very technical task with a steep learning curve.

For the Anti Do-It-Yourselfer

Hire a ISF certified calibration technician to come in and tune your system. This will cost you a few hundred dollars. If you have already spent thousands on your home theater, it will be well worth the extra few dollars. The technician will not only have all the tools and training to do the job right, he or she will also have a professional relationship with the major manufacturers which will likely give them access to adjustment settings that are inaccessible to the consumer (usually to keep you from ruining the set while fiddling with the controls.)

If you want to hire a technician, visit the Imaging Science Foundation website and use their directory to find a technician near you.

For The Hands-On Home Theater Owner

If you would like to do the calibration work yourself, there are two ways to go about the process. Purchase a set of calibration patterns on DVD and spend a few days on the Internet researching how to use them and in what sequence you should make your adjustments, or purchase a computer software and hardware package that will guide you through the process.

There are a number of DVDs available with sets of audio and video test patterns. The AVIA Guide to Home Theater and Digital Video Essentials are both readily available on the web. Read the reviews and see which you like best. As for researching the process, I recommend you start by visiting the Imaging Science Foundation website and reading through their online resources.

On the software/hardware side of things there is the Colorvision STV100 Spyder TV Colormeter. This package is a combination of hardware, software, and a DVD with test patterns. You install the software on your PC, connect the colorimeter device to the USB port, stick the colorimeter on the television screen with the attached suction cups, and display the test patterns from the DVD on the TV. (Unless your PC is next to the television, you will want to have a laptop for this process.) The software will analyze the data coming from the colorimeter and give you instructions for the contrast, brightness, color, tint, and color temperature adjustments you will need to make to optimize your television picture. It removes the guess work from the process by giving you scientific measurements of you television picture to work from.

The Colorvision Spyder TV Colormeter also gives you a complete report of the changes you make for future reference.

No matter which method you choose, you owe it to yourself to calibrate your home theater system to experience the full range of quality it is capable of - you paid for it!