I picked up Digital Video Esstentials from Amazon to calibrate my DLP TV set.
The information was good, if not too much. The instructions on how to use the video patterns was poor – They fire too much information at the user without specific steps.
However, once I watched the same segment several times, I figured out what sort of what I needed to do and adjusted the color on my set.
Brightness was close, but still too high. My set (or the PS3, or the video switch) is dropping blacker-than-black information, so I went with adjusting the left pluge bar.
The colors were really off, and using the color/tint settings were doing nothing useful, so I set those back to default (center values) and used the PerfectColor and PerfectTint controls of my Mitsubishi 57732. This worked much much better.
I didn’t really know how the color values would interact, so I guessed and by trial and error, got things fairly spot on. The only error in color is in the green filter, where magenta and cyan would appear as dark gray, not black. No matter what I did, I could not get them to appear black.
The red and blue filters were spot on, and the green colors (yellow, green) were spot on also.
We’ve noticed much more vibrant colors in both SD and HD content. While watching Jay Leno on the TiVo, Jay looks more red (he appeared grayish before) and the products he was making fun of, blue and green packaging just popped in color. Yellow looks fantastic now, vs washed out before.
I found through the other patterns that my sharpness could be 7 vs 0. My set has a 2.5% overscan and passed all of the resolution tests.
I did not use the set for any audio adjustments as this place only permits us to use 3.1, so I didn’t find it worth it to muck with that.
For $20, this is a very good tool in calibrating your HDTV, just be prepared to be confused by their overly technical explanations and lack of clear directions.