Got my Pro 150fd ISF calibrated last night.
D-Nice, thanks again for your efforts and generosity with the work you do to provide generic settings. Your last generic reference settings of 1/13 were good enough to allow the ISF tech to set up his equipment and have the first input calibrated within 35 minutes. After all of the inputs were done two hours later he decided to give me a discount on the overall fee because he said this 150fd was a piece of cake to calibrate. He felt that the settings I was using were so good already that the minor tweaking he had to do to get my specific set just right was too easy to justify his normal full price. Thank you.
HTWaits, the ISF certified tech I hired was listed on the ISF WEB site of certified technicians for Maryland, named Jeff Dorsch. He is part owner of a HT installation company, which I won't advertise in this note but could tell you the name if you want it. Jeff Dorsch is also an authorized Pioneer sales rep and authorized Pioneer Service technician. He was already very knowledgeable about the Pioneer plasmas, of course, and of the Kuros in particular. He used a Sencore VP403 signal generator with a CP5000/Color Pro III color analyzer setup to do the calibration. Jeff Dorsch was very professional, friendly, informative and accommodating of specific requirements I made for his services. For example, since most of my viewing is at night and in a darkened room, I wanted a nighttime appointment in order to eliminate impact from the ambient light the viewing room gets from windows during daytime. Another example is when he arrived he presumed I would want the calibration done with the new Pioneer supplied software for ISF 3c calibration. But I quickly told him what I instead wanted was each of the HDMI input sources to be calibrated with presets for both D65 and D55 settings since I watch a lot of B&W movies and Criterion DVDs. He was perfectly fine with that requirement as well. He was able to get each setting w/in error margin of 2.5 to 4 % and he credited the plasma's incredible performance that allowed the ease of achieving those results. The flesh tones on my set for both Verizon FIOS HD and my Blu-ray player are just incredibly realistic moreso than ever before, the amount of detail I can now see is improved and the overall crispness of the images is more defined. Colors are simply put, spot on, especially reds and blues. And Ken Ross, although it was not a bugaboo of mine, I could see what you would remark about CS1 vs CS2, but I no longer see magenta in the blue sky, unless it clearly is meant to be there in a sunset, with CS2 after calibration. The PQ was nice before with D-Nice's generic settings but the ISF calibration is a noticeable improvement well worth the cost to bring out as much of what my specific set is capable of performing.
I would have preferred to hire Umr (Jeff Meirer) to do the calibration on my set because of his use of better precision calibration equipment and his reknowned expertise. However, Umr has told me he is currently unavailable in my area. I also do not meet his requirement of needing an audio as well as video calibration. Perhaps if I do upgrade my audio system in the Spring like I plan then I may hire Umr's services for another calibration then.
Meanwhile, anyone here who has an uncalibrated Pio plasma would be well served using D-Nice's reference settings. When you are ready for a professional calibration specific to your set and for whatever reason cannot get Umr's services, and if you are in the Washington DC / Baltimore area, Jeff Dorsch of Jessup MD is well worth considering for calibration services.
and LOL at the same time.
