Robbie Carman,
Colorist And Author
Panasonic 50PZ800U Plasma
Toshiba 32RV530U LCD Panel
JVC DT-V1710CG Studio Reference CRT Monitor
While not Color specfic I thought I just make a quick mention of something I invested in last week.
I have quite a few displays in my facility and one of the things thats always irritated me was getting reference monitors and client monitors matching. Of course different display technologies make it even more challenging
For years I have fiddled with different calibration tools and methods for getting all of our displays to match. Well I finally bit the bullet and hired a calibration engineer to come in calibrate all of our displays.
I hired Lion AV. Gregg Loewen the owner came out to do our calibrations. Gregg is and ISF and THX certified calibrator, in fact he is the lead instructor for THX and their calibration services. The thing that attracted me to Gregg and Lion AV was that he splits his time between consumer and professional calibrations so he has a much time on professional hi end CRTs as he does your Costco LCD.
Using the latest in calibration tools i.e. 30k probe and signal generators Gregg Spent about 60min per display. I was pleased to see that I was pretty close (about 95%) to SMPTE and THX standards but by getting into service menus and such it was amazing to get grayscale and luma output perfect on the displays.
Additionally, we were able to measure and adjust surround lighting to suggested reference. Turns out I was pumping out about 20 more foot lamberts then is ideal.
Now each display in our studio matches (as good a they can for different display technologies) and I can finally rest assured that I’m accurate with each and every correction across multiple displays.
I’ll admit I was hesitant laying out a pretty big chunk of change (about $350 per display) but in the end it was money really well spent.