Well just had my B6 calibrated. Vincent who runs
www.hdtvtest.co.uk did it.
The whole process took around 1h 30. It was really interesting to sit watching him calibrate it, and he was explaining everything along the way. I mentioned I had use the settings of AV forums as starting point and then tweaked them.
The first thing he did was take readings of my settings, more out of interest than anything else. On the CalMan software, it was pretty clear to see just how out of whack my settings were. To much green, to much red.
He then took the dark room setting that I didnt use and reset it to factory. Then took measurements of that. These were quite a bit out as well, but in a very different way to my settings. He then went about making lots of little changes to get the gray scale be spot on. It was really interesting to see how all the adjustments effected the CalMan software in realtime to get the error rating down to pretty much nothing.
One bit that really through me for a bit was not only did he turn all the processing off completely which I also did, he turned the shaping down to 0 as well. But then with what I would class as the main settings everyone plays with, ie the backlight, colour, brightness etc. He left all at factory settings. The logic being if you fix the way colours are displayed you shouldn't really need to change anything. And even after all had been calibrated, I think there is brightness on 51 on colour on 49 so it's all pretty standard. But the deep dive setting changes he made, some were huge.
After the TV had been calibrated he deliberately kept my old setting on there so we could flick between the 2 on various content. It was truly fascinating to see the difference to what I thought was a good picture, against what was now a technically near perfect picture. My settings just looked wrong compared to how they are now. Skin tones are far more realistic, colours bright but not overly so. The detail I can see in shadows is amazing now. Overall the calibrated image just has so much more depth to it. Ive kept my old settings and ill try and get some decent pictures to try and show the difference.
Yes it was expensive, but so was the TV. But the results are very impressive.
