Calibrating Your HDTV for the Best Picture Quality

If you have a high definition TV and are most certainly enjoying the superb picture quality you might have also noticed how hard it is to manually adjust the picture settings. Make no mistake; these plasma and LCD high definition televisions are not your grandfathers old tube technology. Today's televisions are more like computers that have sophisticated electronics including microprocessors and video processors. There are a lot of settings available to get the right picture quality. Getting your HDTV calibrated is definitely worth the value to get an even better picture quality. Ask anyone that has had calibration done and they will tell you that it is a world of difference. (HDTV's are not alone in the calibration; most professional digital photographers have their LCD monitors calibrated to their printers to match up exactly the colors for the best images possible)

You will have to decide on whether you want to hire a professional to do the calibration which can cost anywhere from $100 to $300 dollars or buy software to do it yourself. You can learn more about HDTV calibration and find local certified technicians by visiting the Imaging Science Foundation website. The advantages of a professional are obvious: they know what they are doing, you don't have to figure out software settings on your own, they have the top of the line calibrating software and equipment, and a good calibrator won't leave you with worse picture quality. The do-it-yourself software has the advantages of you get to control all of the settings and in six months can re-do the calibration yourself.

Just because I like to do things myself and I know I would want to keep re-calibrating my home theater, I would go for the do-it-yourself software. There are two good options: CalMan and Spyder2Pro which cost in the range of $200 to $300. These are full blown calibration programs that give you the nitty gritty details of gamma level settings but also some easier wizard settings.

Stay tuned for my review of Spyder2Pro with my own home theater setup but in the meantime I would love to hear about your own do-it-yourself calibration experiences.