# calibrating plasma tv



## dinosaur1 (Nov 22, 2009)

Can I use my laptop and hook it up to my plasma tv's via hdmi to calibrate? Or is it better to burn a disc and use a blu-ray player?

Found this great article which I'm gonna use. 

http://m.lifehacker.com/5858625/how...paign=392f94bf97-UA-142218-1&utm_medium=email


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## gregzoll (Dec 25, 2006)

If you have a netflix account, rent the calibration disc. Also, there are iso downloads for calibration discs available at avsforum.com.


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## dinosaur1 (Nov 22, 2009)

gregzoll said:


> If you have a netflix account, rent the calibration disc. Also, there are iso downloads for calibration discs available at avsforum.com.


Tried it and it worked out great using my laptop!


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## gregzoll (Dec 25, 2006)

dinosaur1 said:


> Tried it and it worked out great using my laptop!


Problem is, if the laptop is not calibrated, it can cause problems when calibrating a tv. Better to rent the dvd or blu-ray for calibration, or look at the info on avsforum.com. I just used the Lucas THX certified calibration to calibrate both of our hdsets, and it shows a great difference, than factory settings.


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## av-geek (Jan 15, 2012)

also, when you calibrate, make sure you turn off all the image processing in your TV, and in your disc player. These can wreck havoc on calibration, especially TV's with dynamic contrast...they vary the backlight brightness based on the brightness of the signal coming to them to make scenes look brighter or dimmer. Remember auto-color of the sixties and seventies? Well it still exists. Some DVD players have features called like "tru-color" and stuff. You want to turn all that stuff off and then calibrate your equipment. you will be AMAZED at how much better it looks after you tweak it up properly


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## diynot (Jan 2, 2012)

search some of the AV geek forums. when we got our samsung plasma, someone had posted the exact settings for my model that they had after a professional calibration. My set could have been different, but it made a HUGE difference and looks better than almost every hdtv I encounter.

good luck!


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## av-geek (Jan 15, 2012)

"standard" settings like that will get you very close, and will get you about 90 percent of the way there. They will probably work for you in most cases. There are a few things that will affect the quality of the picture though that may deviate you from those settings you got off the net. One of the biggest is lighting conditions. If you know what sort of lighting the person had that posted the settings, and yours are similar, you should be pretty good. If you have unusual lighting conditions however, you may want to review your settings with a test pattern disc. For example, if you primarily watch your TV with the lights our, or if your room gets a lot of ambient light from big windows, or you just like the place lit up like a movie studio. Also, the color temparature of the light makes a difference too. Your eye is like a camera. It' "auto white balances" so, if the lighting in your room is very yellow-reddish, like if you are using dimmed incandescant light, the picture on your TV will look very blueish. Likewise, if you have the room lit by fluorescent, the picture will look too warm, despite the fact the setting on the TV is the same under both lighting conditions. Most TV's have a color temperature setting that you can adjust the picture to look warm or cool. Simply adjust this so that white really looks white. You shouldn't need to mess with the red, green, and blue adjusters unless you have some really oddly color lighting (or your room is painted with a deep solid color)

Lastly, is cable length, which is probably not a problem in most homes, but in professional settings, where the equipment may be installed more than 25 feet from the display devices, cable length becomes an issue. It is also only an issue when using analog video formats like RGB, VGA, component video, or composite. HDMI will simply not work at all if the cable is too long. Color balance can be affected by cable length because of subtle differences in the resistance in the runs of cable. The longer the cable, the more dramatic the differences. In other words, if the red cable is a few ohms less in resistance than the blue, the picture will take on a reddish tint.


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