Calibrating your television for the Xbox 360.

[Simmy]

An easy enough mistake to make. The only way to change colour temperature (other than the presets) is to go into the service menu and adjust RGB cuts & gains. This is not something anyone should do without a hardware calibration device, which can tell you exactly what's happening as you're adjusting this. Doing this can seriously ruin the image if you don't know what you're doing, I would not recommend it at all.

Any RGB controls available in the user menus will be to adjust the colour decoder, not the greyscale/colour temperature of the display.

Simmy; leaving the My Colour Control at the defaults shouldn't affect the image. (or it has the least effect anyway)

Always a good idea. Can't believe I forgot to mention that.

On the Samsung LCD at least, the brightness sensor adjusts the backlight, not the "brightness" control. This has the effect of lowering both brightness and contrast at the same time, rather than just black level.

If you do wish to use it, turn it off when setting the contrast control (to set the max output properly) and cover it up (to lower backlight to minimum) to set the brightness.

This way you will never have a blinding image, and you won't be losing shadow detail even when it drops right down. This is quite a compromise though, and why I prefer to just have it off and have one preset for daytime use, and one for when it's dark.

Good lord so now I need day/night settings for both 360 and DVD - going to be there for hours

edit : Aria or DVE ?????

[mid]

I like DVE, but mainly because it's only a tenner. My limited experience with Aria didn't show up anything that made me think I needed to spend the extra for it.

Aria's main advantage is that it isn't a total nightmare to navigate until you get used to it, though.

[themanwithapc]

I've still to get mine, but this is another excellent guide andrewfee. I'll deffo refer to it once I get my 360.

[Simmy]

Is it worth trying with a THX optimiser first, or should I get DVE ordered and in place for when the TV arrives ?

[krispyk]

This was posted on AV Forums some time ago and is quite useful for calibration as well!!

http://www.pluggedin.tv/sweetspot/s...loads/nokia.zip

[mid]

THX Optimizer will probably get you a better result than the default setting, but it's decidedly less than ideal, because they seem to alter it from disc to disc for some surreal reason.

However, it's a lot easier to get to the audio phase tests than DVE, so I like to have it in my arsenal when I'm helping friends set their systems up anyway.

[Simmy]

I'll get the DVE disk on order, and use that in combination with THX off of a DVD and Andrews tools as well.

Can you get DVE cheaper than on play ? You mentioned a tenner I think, but its nearer 15 notes on play !

[dc-arena]

The THX Optimizer is fine for DVDs, but its way too dark for games like PGR3 on my projector. It's dark enough through the parks in London anyway, but using my DVD setting makes it fooking nails!

[SubparMario]

Just did the calibration on a 26" Samsung with my 360 over component and it looks a lot better.

A couple of things:

I remember reading again and again that sharpness 50/100 was the off point on the Samsungs. It clearly isn't. Just found out that it's been murdering the 360's picture over component!

I couldn't see an inner box at any point while adjusting the brightness with the 'computer black' image. I've ended up slapping it on 50/100.

The brightness sensor option is definitely different since I upgraded the firmware using one of those kits Samsung sent out. It used to dim the backlight quite a bit but now it seems to raise it ever so slightly when enabled. in exactly the same environment. It actually looks pretty good though, so I keep it on now.