On Saturday I had my HDTV professionally (ISF) calibrated. I did some research and found someone that was highly regarded in the industry, and since he was flying out to my area this past weekend, I booked him. He was very professional and personable, and worked hard on calibrating my set.

Results? Well, I certainly like the colours better. They are a lot more lifelike, and my wife noticed the difference too. Another cool thing he did was to set the default TV settings to the correct, calibrated settings. So I can fiddle with sharpness, brightness, whatever, as much as I want on a show-by-show basis, and just hit reset when done to go back to the calibrated settings. Pretty neat, huh?

Did I find anything bad? Well, actually I did. After calibration the blacks were more grey than before. Which I really didn’t like. As well, the geometry near the bottom of the screen seemed a little squished. I’ve never noticed that before, but it might have been there before the calibration. [Edit: I forgot to mention that I asked him to fix up my overscan, which was cutting off way too much of the image. This may have affected things.] So I still have to see if I can correct the former and live with the latter.

So the jury’s still out. I’ll have to live with my new set for a while longer to see if the calibration was worth the time and money.

Oh, and by the way, I also got some bad news in the process. It seems like my particular set has a problem resolving more than 900 or so vertical lines of resolution. (He showed me the test pattern that clearly showed the problem.) The calibrator said that he’s never seen that problem on this particular set before, so it looks like I got a bum set. No wonder I never had the ultimate in sharpness! Ah well, nothing I can do about that. I’m still happy with my set, mostly because I have to be! There’s no way I can afford to buy a new one. And there’s also now way that I’m going to let myself not enjoy my set because of a problem I didn’t even know about before.