edtyct
11-24-2005, 08:51 AM
Okay, it's holiday time, and your significant others may be asking what you'd like for Christmas. The subject of video calibration has come up a number of times on this board, and disks like DVE, AVIA, and S&V usually pepper the responses--rightly so. But these disks, helpful as they undeniably are, rely on two imperfect instruments (besides the TV), your eyes (I should know; my eyes are extraordinarily imperfect instruments). Anybody who's had to toggle endlessly between the contrast and brightness settings on their TV to get black and white to cooperate, between color and tint (color filters in hand) to balance RGB, and between various test screens to determine overscan, resolution, and sharpness knows how trying the process can be.
Colorvision's Spyder TV purports to take all of the squinting and guesswork out of amateur calibration. Armed with a suitable laptop PC, test software supplied by the company, information entered by the consumer about TV type/controls, and a colorimeter that attaches to the center of the TV screen via a PC's USB connection (it looks like a spider), the apparatus assesses gray scale and color temperature to provide the optimal settings on the user menu. Though it falls short of a professional service-menu calibration with an expensive color analyzer by some unknown degree, Spyder TV's results, based on mathematical precision and an accurate database, stand to reduce the margin of error considerably.
The question is whether you want to drop $200 to try it out. I can imagine that some people who like the idea of calibration but hate the prospect of twiddling knobs and trying to follow the likes of Joe Kane as he explains video nirvana on DVD might pony up. A lot of other people might find the gadgetry fun, convenient, and informative enough to buy at that price, especially since re-calibration should be done as often as desired but at least every few months. Eventually, Spyder TV calibration will become quicker and easier than the manual labor of the DVD variety.
Anyone interested can do a google on it for more detail.
Colorvision's Spyder TV purports to take all of the squinting and guesswork out of amateur calibration. Armed with a suitable laptop PC, test software supplied by the company, information entered by the consumer about TV type/controls, and a colorimeter that attaches to the center of the TV screen via a PC's USB connection (it looks like a spider), the apparatus assesses gray scale and color temperature to provide the optimal settings on the user menu. Though it falls short of a professional service-menu calibration with an expensive color analyzer by some unknown degree, Spyder TV's results, based on mathematical precision and an accurate database, stand to reduce the margin of error considerably.
The question is whether you want to drop $200 to try it out. I can imagine that some people who like the idea of calibration but hate the prospect of twiddling knobs and trying to follow the likes of Joe Kane as he explains video nirvana on DVD might pony up. A lot of other people might find the gadgetry fun, convenient, and informative enough to buy at that price, especially since re-calibration should be done as often as desired but at least every few months. Eventually, Spyder TV calibration will become quicker and easier than the manual labor of the DVD variety.
Anyone interested can do a google on it for more detail.