Getting the most from my Sony KL-46VL130 with i1Display Pro

I previously posted this under LCD monitors without realizing there is a separate display calibration thread. My bad.

I own an i1Display Pro Calibrator which my wife (the pro Photographer) and I use to calibrate our Mac displays. But I was unable to use the i1 to calibrate the Home Theatre. I was always manually-calibrating the Home Theatre monitor because the i1 only works with a PC, not with a standalone Blu-Ray player. It's not a standalone calibrator. And i1 won't sell me a license to upgrade it, to my knowledge. Anyway, I've recently revamped the entire Home Theatre with a dedicated HTPC and now I'm using JRiver for video playback. It looks wonderful. So nice to have everything in the computer and now I can use the i1 do calibrate the display.

The monitor is a 2008 Sony 46" Bravia, KL-46VL130. It's not an XBR, but it does have a lot of Sony's high-end features including 10-bit video, a wide Gamut CCFL backlight, and so on.

So I installed the i1Display calibration program in the PC and proceeded to do the calibration. When I was done the result looks great to my eyes, but I think it can be better. As you may know, the i1Display program is an auto-setup program that displays color swatches on the screen and creates a monitor profile for your monitor. It's all automatic.

To start off with, I reset the Sony monitor's Cinema setting to default. I then set a goal of 235 cd/m square luminance in the i1. I set it to achieve a custom contrast ratio of 1000:1. The Sony advertises 2000:1, I wonder if I should try again with 2000:1? Unfortunately, I set the backlight setting in the program to a "normal cold cathode" and discovered later that this Sony monitor has a wide gamut CCFL backlight, so I should definitely redo the setup. I then adjusted the brightness and contrast and rgb guns to reach the program's level mark for r, g, and b which would yield the desired luminance and color temperature (65k).

The result: No pain, much gain! Black levels look good, there are good deep blacks, yet inner details are visible, the video looks real nice. Colors look good, maybe a little pale on the Enchanted Blu-Ray and some blu-rays that come direct from HD rather than film. But the slightly pale look could be the Blu-Ray movie itself. Really, it looks great, there's nothing to bother anyone but a techno-nerd like me.

So why am I complaining? Because I popped in the Joe Kane HD Essentials Blu-Ray and discovered the gray scale ramp looks greenish on some of the lower-mid-level swatches. Which could explain the slightly pale look of the color on skin tones. And I cannot see the 2% black swatch, though some threads here say if you can't see the 2% black, don't try to fix it or you'll wash out your blacks, and I don't want to do that! In fact, I was not able to reveal the 2% black swatch with any adjustment of the brightness or picture controls, so I assume the set must be cutting it out to begin with. But it would be nice to see some distinction in the gray scale ramp between the lowest and second lowest swatch (bar). This set also has the dreaded "picture" control which affects black level as well as white, so you really have to play with all the controls if you want to do manual adjustment.

Backlight?
I have the backlight on minimum because I was really ignorant of how to set it, but this wonderful AVS thread is going to be very helpful: http://www.avsforum.com/t/1351213/for-those-struggling-with-brightness-contrast-backlight-settings-on-lcds.

So now I'm looking for a method that can combine manual setup with the i1 setup. Since I do not have a standalone colorimiter, I wonder if I can get any more out of the i1Display's routine. Perhaps it's doing its best with what you give it in the monitor setup. But maybe if I knew what to do with the backlight I would give the i1 Display program more meat to work with.

Looking at the Joe Kane grayscale ramp, I concluded brightness and Picture are at their optimum; definitely there's nothing better there than what the i1 ended up with. However, I wonder if I played with the backlight as a variable. I wonder if I leave the brightness and contrast where I set them for the i1, and use the Joe Kane and AVS disc to find the optimum backlight whether I'll get a better result if I then run the i1 program all over again. Would the backlight help distinguish the difference between the lowest two bars of the grayscale ramp? And then when I re-run the i1 program would it just undo it all? Inquiring minds want to know.

Wow, that's a mouthful. Hope you all follow this....

Hi again. Another idea I have is that my choice of luminance level might not be optimum for this set, although there's no eyestrain and it looks great, not clipping or fatiguing in my room with a touch of ambient light behind the set.

My idea is that prior to running the i1 program again I manually tweak brightness, picture and backlight with the Joe Kane and AVS discs to see if I can get a better step ramp at the lowest levels. Whatever combination produces the best low level ramp, even if it's a slightly lower luminance.

Then I run the i1 program. Initially it's set for 235 luminance. But if the i1 says I have to raise the brightness or the rgb of the set, then I'll cancel the setup and lower the luminance goal until the i1 says I don't have to touch it. I then continue the setup, generate a new monitor profile and maybe this will produce an even better setup than with the i1 alone. It's a bit bass-ackwards, but it makes sense to my warped mind.

What do you think of that plan?

BK

Though no one's answered yet I went ahead with my plan. First I discovered is the reason the chips in the Joe Kane greyscale looked slightly green is that dam*** ^(*&^(*&^(* Windows did not apply the monitor profile to the whole system, and apparently JRiver does not use its own monitor profile but rather requires the system profile. So I was looking at an uncorrected monitor, well, not exactly an uncorrected monitor, because the brightness, contrast and the guns had been brought in line to the first stage metering of i1. i1 let's you manually get it "in the ballpark" and then takes it from there.

Advice to HTPC users: Beware the frumious bandersnatch! If you are making or using an HTPC and playing video discs from a computer drive, then you will have to deal with monitor profiles at some point. I think it's best to have a correct monitor profile to start with even if you do use an external colorimeter to adjust the monitor, rather than adjust the profile to fit the monitor. Perhaps someone can recommend a "standard" monitor profile for windows and/or Mac which you could use to start with if you do not have an i1 Display pro or similar colorimeter designed to work directly with the computer.

So, once I assigned the monitor profile to the operating system, the grey scale ramp looked much better, lost its color tinge. And apparently the windows default profile cuts out below black, because now that I had a proper monitor profile I could see the entire pluge display. I checked the Pluge, and finally, now that I had a real monitor profile, I could tweak all three black levels to where they should be. (2% chip barely visible, and below black chip at the same apparent level as the black background). This observed in an almost dark room with a tiny amount of illumination behind the monitor, less than 10% white to my eye. I could measure ambience with the i1 but I didn't bother.

So I continued with my plan. I pretweaked the brightness and contrast with the Joe Kane pluge and greyscale ramp. I raised the backlight slightly observing the greyscale ramp, as a little bit more seemed to help the amplitude and whiteness of the highest white chip a bit without hurting the low end of the grey scale one bit and the entire ramp was still visible as a stepped ramp. Setting the backlight this way could be a bad idea (experts please advise) but that's what I decided.

Then I returned to the i1 setup, did some very fine tweaking of the guns to get them all in line on the initial settings page and the brightness on the next page, and then let i1 do its work. The result is the color saturation of the Blu-Rays looks better, the "paleness" of color is gone, and black levels are more deep.

I tried Gamma in the i1 at 2.2 and at 2.4 and to my taste definitely decided on Gamma 2.4 as it provides a deeper range of blacks and I think represents the director of photography's choice more exactly than 2.2, which brings up a tiny bit too much detail in the deep blacks than I think was intended.

Enjoy! If you have anything to add, I'm all ears.
Edited by bobkatz - 2/26/13 at 6:55am

This thread is turning into a progressive-learning on how to set up and use monitor profiles with a HTPC. The procedure with the i1 is much easier than with an external calibrator, so if you are considering buying a calibrator and building a HTPC to play videos from the computer as opposed to using a standalone blu-ray player, then I recommend you get a computer-style calibrator that makes profiles, like the i1. A side benefit is if you have any office computers or if you are a photographer, you can calibrate your computer monitors this way as well.

For the Sony Monitor, outside of the reset for the Cinema setting, I set the following initial settings:

Backlight: Adjusted with the Joe Kane disc to produce a slightly clearer white in the grayscale ramp as long as it's not too high to affect the lower portion of the ramp perceptually in any way. This method may not be correct, I'd need an expert to confirm this!

Picture and Brightness: Adjusted in combination to produce the smoothest ramp, starting with values which in a first run of the i1 produced my desired luminance of 235 mc/m squared and arrived at the marks on the i1's initial setup rgb meters and the page that follows.

Color: Left at default of 50. i1 will take care of the rest.

Hue: Left at default of 0. i1 will take care of the rest.

Color Temp: Neutral. i1 will take care of the rest, going for 6500.

Sharp: Left at default of 50

Nose Reduction: Set to OFF (not the default). Again, an expert can enter in, but I never found the NR control to help in any noisy passages.

MPEG NR: Off

DRC Mode OFF

Advanced settings:

Black Corr OFF

Advanced Contrast Enhancer OFF

Gamma OFF (not the default). I found this to be best and let i1 do all the gamma correction.

Clear White OFF

Color Space Wide (I didn't see much difference with this control, and I'm not even sure if it was the wrong decision, but it's where I left it).

Live Color OFF

White Bal: Adjusted the rgb main controls using the i1 initial setup screen taking measurements to the i1's initial "meter". It's not important to get these EXACT, but if you have them "on the 0 line" i1 will have less work to do to get the color just right. I left all the bias (low level rgb) levels at 0.

Detail Enhancer OFF

Edge Enhancer OFF

Windows Profile setup AFTER creating the profile in i1 Display Pro: Very important. As I discovered, JRiver was not using the monitor profile I had created because it has to be system-wide. Although I did choose "system" in the save profile screen in the i1 Profiler. Attached are four images of the windows system color management to show you what i set. I urge you to re-enter each screen again after closing to make sure your choices stick. I did find some windows bugs where the profile appears to be set but when you re-enter the same window it really was not!