Simeon,
It ain't easy. Some folks pay a professional to come in and do it for them. A professional calibrator (an "ISF" calibrator) will use signal generators. For example he'll use and HDTV signal generator via the antenna inputs on your HDTV receiver to produce a known calibration signal via that receiver through to the input on your display.
Presuming you are doing it yourself, here are some hints.
First, hook up your DVD player the way you want to use it and calibrate that connection. Have patience and keep tweaking until you stop seeing improvements in DVD movies you like to watch. One of the things you are doing here is training your eye as to what a calibrated image LOOKS LIKE. The "steaming rat" thread here will give you some hints as to things to look for.
Temporarily hook up your DVD player via the other inputs and calibrate for your DVD player on those inputs. All you are trying to do at this point is make sure you've turned off any "torch mode" nonsense on those inputs and get them into at least a possible ballpark of proper calibration. If the settings you end up with happen to work for any of your other devices it will just be pure luck, but taking this step will at least insure that you've turned off the nonsense in your display that would fight against any possibility of proper calibration for those other devices.
Now hook up you other devices and start tweaking by eye. Again the "steaming rat" thread will give you suggestions as to what to look for. Constantly refer back to what should now be the excellent image quality you are getting from your DVD player on its calibrated connection. That's your gold standard of what a calibrated image SHOULD look like from your other devices.
Keep an eye out for any test patterns that might be available via your other devices. For example, if your HDTV service carries HDNET, check the small collection of test patterns that HDNET broadcasts on Tuesday mornings at 8:00 am Eastern time (adjust for your time zone and note that HDNET doesn't do this every week, so you'll have to keep checking).
Perhaps the most important advice here is to iterate -- do it all over again. It takes time for your eye to learn what a calibrated image looks like and what a not-quite-calibrated image shows wrong. So after you think you've got it right, take the time to view a significant amount of content and then record all the settings you've achieved for all connections and start over from the beginning.
Changes should be relatively minor, but trust your new eye and leave them changed until you've had a chance to view a variety of content at the changed levels. Even for the DVD settings achieved via the calibration DVD, it is not at all unusual for someone new to calibration to discover that the precision with which you use the tools on the calibration DVD improves over time.
If you can stash settings in display memories and switch between them while watching programs, that's also a big help, because it will help reinforce the idea that all this tweaking you are doing is in fact actually improving things! Keep at it. Make small changes as experiments. Have patience. And enjoy the great new images from your display.
--Bob
It ain't easy. Some folks pay a professional to come in and do it for them. A professional calibrator (an "ISF" calibrator) will use signal generators. For example he'll use and HDTV signal generator via the antenna inputs on your HDTV receiver to produce a known calibration signal via that receiver through to the input on your display.
Presuming you are doing it yourself, here are some hints.
First, hook up your DVD player the way you want to use it and calibrate that connection. Have patience and keep tweaking until you stop seeing improvements in DVD movies you like to watch. One of the things you are doing here is training your eye as to what a calibrated image LOOKS LIKE. The "steaming rat" thread here will give you some hints as to things to look for.
Temporarily hook up your DVD player via the other inputs and calibrate for your DVD player on those inputs. All you are trying to do at this point is make sure you've turned off any "torch mode" nonsense on those inputs and get them into at least a possible ballpark of proper calibration. If the settings you end up with happen to work for any of your other devices it will just be pure luck, but taking this step will at least insure that you've turned off the nonsense in your display that would fight against any possibility of proper calibration for those other devices.
Now hook up you other devices and start tweaking by eye. Again the "steaming rat" thread will give you suggestions as to what to look for. Constantly refer back to what should now be the excellent image quality you are getting from your DVD player on its calibrated connection. That's your gold standard of what a calibrated image SHOULD look like from your other devices.
Keep an eye out for any test patterns that might be available via your other devices. For example, if your HDTV service carries HDNET, check the small collection of test patterns that HDNET broadcasts on Tuesday mornings at 8:00 am Eastern time (adjust for your time zone and note that HDNET doesn't do this every week, so you'll have to keep checking).
Perhaps the most important advice here is to iterate -- do it all over again. It takes time for your eye to learn what a calibrated image looks like and what a not-quite-calibrated image shows wrong. So after you think you've got it right, take the time to view a significant amount of content and then record all the settings you've achieved for all connections and start over from the beginning.
Changes should be relatively minor, but trust your new eye and leave them changed until you've had a chance to view a variety of content at the changed levels. Even for the DVD settings achieved via the calibration DVD, it is not at all unusual for someone new to calibration to discover that the precision with which you use the tools on the calibration DVD improves over time.
If you can stash settings in display memories and switch between them while watching programs, that's also a big help, because it will help reinforce the idea that all this tweaking you are doing is in fact actually improving things! Keep at it. Make small changes as experiments. Have patience. And enjoy the great new images from your display.
--Bob
