What's involved

15-point calibration

A standard calibration involves this 15-point procedure.

  1. Measure pre-calibration grayscale
  2. Measure pre-calibration color gamut
  3. Calibrate Black Level
  4. Calibrate White Level
  5. Calibrate Color/Tint
  6. Calibrate Sharpness
  7. Calibrate White Balance High End
  8. Calibrate White Balance Low End
  9. Calibrate color decoding (if applicable)
  10. Calibrate color gamut (if applicable)
  11. Calibrate Gamma (if applicable)
  12. Measure post-calibration grayscale
  13. Measure post-calibration color gamut
  14. Re-calibrate white balance, gamut, decoding, and gamma if necessary
  15. Generate calibration report

What benefits may I expect to see?

I am often asked the question "How much will a calibration improve my picture?" Unfortunately, there is no single answer to this. It all depends on two factors:

Some units come with fairly good settings out-of-the-box, while other units are poorly adjusted at the factory or significantly drift over time. I have seen several otherwise very nice displays whose color temperature was so high it was beyond the ability of my instrumention to measure it. I worked on a Pioneer plasma once whose color temperature was so inaccurate that everything on the screen had a sick greenish tint. In these cases the improvement is dramatic.

However, easily the biggest roadbloack to getting a good calibration is that displays often simply lack the necessary controls. You can't calibrate what you can't adjust. I look forward to the day, I hope in the the not too distant future, in which consumers will be able to purchase an external box that will add all of the necessary controls, thus ensuring an excellent calibration.

So, the answer to the question above is that "It all depends." All displays visibly benefit from calibration, but for some displays the benefit is more dramatic than for others. A good display device with natural, accurate color and correctly adjusted white and black levels is very seductive and greatly enhances viewing pleasure.

When should I obtain a calibration?

A display's performance may drift significantly in the first 100 hours of use (this is especially true for CRTs and digital projectors that use UHP lamps). Therefore, I recommend that you use your display for a little while before having it calibrated.

Potential roadblocks

A calibration can usually be completed in 2-3 hours. In some cases it may take longer (for example, I may have an incorrect service menu access code). When this occurs, I may have to return to finish the job. There are a bewildering number of makes and models and they change every year. Because of this it's hard to keep up on every model's access code. Sometimes I may have to return to complete the job after doing some additional research.