Cheap..er calibration options for an LCD

[kernow]

Hello,

A friend brought around 'spyder2' tonight, some software for apparently calibrating your TV or monitor. It has a big plastic thing you stick on the front of the tv, and run some software on a connected computer in windows and it'll run through a few tests with you, and at the end you're supposed to have a nicely calibrated image.

well, when I bought my television I was wrongly informed by the sales..woman, that it had a VGA input, I got it home and it doesn't, but no big deal, I'd probably use a DVI-HDMI adaptor if I ever needed to connect a PC anyway.

So, with no method of connecting my laptop, or any other PC in the house, as they are all older machines or laptops with no DVI or component auxillary cables, we had the ingenius idea of booting the PS3 into my gentoo linux install and running a remote desktop client back to my laptop in 32bit colour, using rdesktop.

Now this was all fine and dandy until it got to the messy point of having to run through the calibration on the host pc and not on the rdp client to the host pc, basically I gave up and set it back to my preferred settings.

So, basically I'm asking if those DVD's you see on ebay are any good, and if there are any other methods that don't require a pc as a host to calibrate the display. I have an older Panasonic TX32LXD60, and the current settings I find ok, but the 'brightness.jpg' that member andrewfee posted here, saying you should be able to see 70 percent or so of the white boxes on the black background, well it seems I can only see about 30 percent, if that. it looks good to me but its still driving me insane thinking about it not running at its best.

I use the set mainly for ps3 gaming, and the odd DVD. I use the black levels and skin tone representation as a half-good test of wether 'I' think it looks good or not , but of course everyones opinion is different.

If anyone has the same set I'm using the following settings and think its actually not too bad, but if anyone can point out a cheapish calibration tool or system of some sort I would be very grateful.

settings

mode AUTO
Contrast: 75 %
Brightness: 55%
Colour: 50 %
Sharpness: 85 %
Colour Balance: Normal
P-NR: Off

I found these settings after checking a 70 page thread on avsforum and doing a bit of reading, and I think the colour and black representation is quite good at these settings, but the picture andrewfee provided might prove me otherwise.

I really should just accept it at what it is as I think its not too bad.

any help or pointers on a cheap calibration tool would be appreciated.

thanks

[EvilBoris]

I think that most Disney DVDs/Blu Rays have a THX calibration tool on them (Ratatouille and Finding Nemo definately do)

There is always the fairly comprehensive DVE disc too

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Digital-Video-Essentials-Basics-Blu-ray/dp/B000V6LST0

[kernow]

I've heard about the THX tools on the disney discs, but also heard its film-specific, I guess I'll have to see if theres one in the house, but I don't think so hah. I'll take a look at the other one too maybe, its a good price.

thanks

[EvilBoris]

It probably is a bit disc specific as they are most likely all encoded ever so slightly differently. Any DVD based one could well be input specific also, so you may need to run it on different inputs.

[kernow]

hmmhh, I guess I'll just keep fiddling until I see get nice results, but then Its not bad at present really, I don't how it could ever be perfect for everything.

[fallenangle]

I've often spent up to 30 mins adjusting the display to suit the specific games before starting play. Many have brightness and contrast setting controls in the menus and the fact they do surely tells you there's no consistency.

I think that those things are pretty useless anyway, particularly for brightness. Those colour bar test patterns where you're supposed to adjust the brightness so that nothing be seen beneath the horizontal line give settings on my CRT TV that make most dark games unplayable.

As said the input type being used that can have huge effect on your settings. RGB enhances contrast and colour significantly over composite, S-Video or component. Then there's 50Hz, 60Hz, Prog Scan issues to consider eg. at 60Hz the PS2 goes outputs NTSC and I've yet to use a TV where the settings for a PAL PS2 game at 50Hz are ideal for 60Hz. It even makes a difference using composite or S-Video via SCART as opposed to dedicated composite AV or S-Video sockets.

Add other AV equipment, the TV's age, viewing conditions/lighting and personal preference into the equation and it should be obvious that only you can set your display up for ideal PQ. Even that will have to be adjusted for specific games or DVDs. Anybody else's figures will likely be meaningless and even calibration DVDs will only give you a base to start from.