Recommended holiday gift by Home Theater magazine, December 2003.

Recommended Holiday Gift under $500 by Sound & Vision Magazine, December 2003.

As an ISF trained home theater calibrator, my goal is to help you get the most accurate, lifelike picture possible from your TV. There are strict standards for both standard and high definition video. If you're a home theater enthusiast, you know it's extremely important to adhere to these standards as closely as possible. When you're watching your favorite show, you don't want to see a tainted rendition with flat, cold colors and obscured or over hyped detail; rather, you want to soak in the rich, lifelike surroundings... to notice the details in the shadows... to see the nuances in the actor's faces with lifelike colors. Interestingly, while many displays have the capability to deliver that experience, very few even come close without careful calibration.

Why don't they take care of that at the factory? The most reputable manufacturers go to great lengths to make sure their sets can be made more accurate. However, depending on the type of display, there are many reasons accuracy can't be attained from the factory:

• Manufacturers can be influenced more by market researchers than accuracy standards.  Marketing research has shown that the majority of TV buyers are attracted to the brightest set in the showroom, and manufacturers have been going crazy ever since- making their displays excessively gaudy and overdriving them to grab your attention and keep it from the other brand. Once you get it home, the side effects can become distracting and annoying.
• Brand recognition is highly sought after, so Brand X might push colors (or some other aspect of performance) to the extreme in an effort to look different from Brand Z.
• The TV manufacturer can't know what equipment makes up the rest of your system, or how that equipment is set.
  
• Since our eyes perceive bluish whites to be brighter than neutral whites, making a television’s whites bluer or “cooler” than the standard has become a common practice. It can be visualized by the different ways in which soft white and cool white light bulbs illuminate the room. The cool white bulb may look brighter, but will cause things to have an unnatural cast compared to natural light. Television standards do not call for this cooler shade of white, and it therefore causes an unnatural cast to the picture that can’t be eliminated with regular color and tint controls.
• With a CRT based television, moving and transporting the set to your home throws the alignment of the red, blue, and green guns off from what it was at the factory.
• To keep prices low, tight manufacturing tolerances are sometimes thrown out the window- which makes the set’s performance rather unpredictable. To compensate for this, manufacturers typically add picture “band-aids,” which cover up inaccuracies but cause problems of their own. For example, it has become quite common to boost red hues to make sure flesh tones don’t look green.

Nearly all TVs have advanced picture controls hidden away in a secret service menu. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of picture quality adjustments are kept securely there. Proper calibration requires experience and knowledge of the service menu, high precision test equipment to measure the results, and the dedication and determination to do the job right. That's what you get with a full service ISF calibration from HDTV by Chad B. Every used input type on your TV will be optimized with it's own calibration whenever possible. The best results are obtained by digging deep and doing whatever is possible to increase picture performance. Your display will be fine tuned and calibrated to NTSC and HDTV standards, which will make the picture truly shine!

Is there a downside? Since it is now truly accurate and is not sugar-coating source problems with inaccuracies of it's own, a calibrated set may be more ruthlessly revealing of quality differences between sources. Occasionally that may take some getting used to, especially if your cable service is of questionable quality. But that's a small price to pay for true picture fidelity. Sometimes the more earthy-toned white balance may come as an initial shock after watching uncalibrated displays for so long.  Simply put, after calibration you can say goodbye to those rose colored glasses once and for all!

What will it look like? Most displays will:

• Be smoother but with more natural detail
• Have more accurate, earthy-toned, and rich colors but with less "sunburn" effect on skin tones
• Have more natural looking dark scenes and shadows, with more things visible in the dark shadows
• Look less strained and "clayfaced"
• Look more 3 dimensional
• Be easier to read program guides and information

I am committed to provide the most thorough, meticulous, and careful ISF calibration available!  No corners will be cut, and I'll spend as much time as required to get it done right.  Calibration times range from about 2 hours to around 12 hours, depending on your display and system, but pricing is a flat fee ($375) with no hidden expenses.

Home Theater Services

The standard audio calibration service ($100) includes checking and optimizing wiring of all components, help with proper speaker placement, measuring speaker distance and delay times, calibrating levels with sound level meter, phase check of all speakers, and optimizing receiver/processor settings. Proper sound calibration and setup can make a huge difference in the enjoyment of your system!  The advanced audio calibration ($250) includes all that plus frequency response measurement of each speaker and precision equalization if your equipment allows it.