Just had Randy Tomlinson leave my apartment, and it. is. amazing. The fleshtones no longer look red. Fox, who's programming ALL looked red now looks great; I even see the 3-D effect everyone talks about, and it blew my mind. Randy told me that it had some of the worst default calibration he's ever seen*, but my Insignia NS-27HTV had almost perfect geometry. He also said that in some ways it's better than a Sony CRT, though the brightness and sharpness don't go up as high, so the brightness has to be at about 90 (out of 100) and sharpness at 17 (out of 20), but he was really impressed by the set, especially for a no-name brand from Best Buy.

Wow, just... wow.

Interesting anecdote: He told me that at one point he was brought in to consult for a company that had Chinese factories looking awful. He showed them how to properly calibrate a set, and from then on almost all the sets were perfectly calibrated right out of the box. He says that when you show the Chinese how to do something, they do it well.

Now I'm off to rewatch the Thing. After taking a quick look at a clip at the end of the calibration procedure, "The Thing" creature no longer looks red, and shows much more color and detail. Yay!

* How bad? The red push was so high, that at the beginning of the calibration, when he was still showing simple test patterns from gray scale, I saw an immediate improvement in the image quality. Yeah, awful defaults.

ETA: One more thing, he was surprised that the OTA and the DVD connections "agreed" almost perfectly, since there's usually a difference in how different inputs react in terms of image quality. :)

Glad to hear about the improvement. One question, though: when you say "default" do you mean as set to the factory presets ("vivid," "movie," whatever) or had you already adjusted the user settings to some degree?

I had done some adjustments using AVIA, but the contast was 25, brightness 72, Color 46, tint at 0, and sharpness at 11. After he did all the service menu stuff, including centering the controls, he gave me different values for OTA and DVD, with HD-DVD having a slightly higher tint setting. New settings are 30c, 60b, 48 color, 15 tint, sharpness 17 (out of 20), for OTA. DVD is 60c, 95b, 48 color, 5 tint, sharpness 15. for HD-DVD, he recommended tint at 7.

He had centered color at 50 for accuracy, but he recommended 48, since it looked better.

To answer your question though, I meant the default service menu settings, not the user controls, just thought I'd throw the other settings up there.