color correction preview HDTV

[Peter Osinski]

today I was at best buy reading about their calibration service for HDTVs. It's 199 dollars and the tech has to go into the service menu to do it so its not using the regular menu controls.

If i got this kind of service done on a decent lcd/plasma/led TV would it work for color grading if I connected it to a video card via HDMI?

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

No, not for real color correction at any rate.

It would probably be good for the client preview monitor, so long as your clients are trained to have a look at the production monitor before commenting on colors.

I prefer to do my own calibration though, and most edit suites have the tools to let you do this... although you may need to use a bit of creativity. (For example- simulate a blue gun only feed of SMPTE bars)

Check the internet, you can access the "service menu" settings on many TV's. although I generally don't bother.

Also have a look at Panasonic's Plasma TVs that are intended for professional use. I can't recall the model number but they have units that are essentially just their Viera TV's but can take SDI i/o boards and such. You can search here for it.

 

[David Rasberry]

Some new generation TV's are coming with quite sophisticated user setup menus and calibration routines built in, including blue gun and 10 IRE step RGB gray scale setup. Look for models with spec sheets that say ISFccc ready or a sticker that says ISF certified.
I would not trust the store techs with this unless they are ISF certified though if you want accurate and not over saturated color and greyscale setups. Some of those guys are just nuts.
Current gen plasmas and LCD's from LG for instance all have very sophisticated guided user setup wizards with test screens. They are also true 10 bit displays.
Plasmas are better as LCD's shift color saturation a bit off axis, but any of these can be used for all but the most critical of color grading applications with very good results. Would it be the first choice of a major post house? No, but for your average desktop finishing indie they can serve very well.
I install and calibrate these things by the dozen for corporate video conference and signage applications. The improvement in quality and setup sophistication in the last two years is significant.
Panasonic, LG, and Sharp seem to be the better choices at present.
You can get Joe Kane ISF test charts discs from Amazon for both blur-ray and DVD to aid with setup and calibration. Most of them come out of the box with decent basic white balance throughout the value range already. You just have to turn off all of the consumer feature crap like dynamic contrast and do a basic greyscale and color balance calibration like most TV stations would do for a reference monitor: set color temp to 6500(middle of choice range if not listed) and gamma to 2.2(also middle of choice range typically), set black level with a pluge chart(brightness), set white level (contrast) to give even step separation with an 11 step greyscale chart, set color saturation and tint with SMPTE bars using blue gun only setting, voila you are done.
These TV's definitely are a better reference monitor for color correction than most computer monitors and do reflect the actual viewing environment your customer will be using.