4. OPERATION continued …

TEST PATTERNS

This section is a primer on display calibration and although the procedure is no match for a professional setup, the result will almost always be better than using the display with its factory settings. The only tool needed to adjust color this way is a blue filter, either one that comes with test discs or the glasses available from www.thx.com.

These digitally generated patterns can be more accurate than those played from a disc since some discs and players contain errors either in design or in user settings.

PICTURE

 

CROP INPUT

 

SCALE OUT

 

OUTPUT

 

PATTERNS

 

INFO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gray Bars

Red Bars

Green Bars

Blue Bars

Gray/Red/Green/Blue Bars

Color Bars

Before starting calibration

Set the room’s lighting to the level that will be used during normal viewing. If your display varies light output according to the brightness of the image and/or ambient light, turn off these functions for now. If color temperature is selectable, select ‘medium’ or the one that is neither too blue nor too red. If your display has DVI input, ensure that the correct output between Studio and Extended RGB is selected in menu 1.

The best setting for the display’s sharpness control is usually at its lowest even when the default position is in the center. Sharpness is the addition of false edges around objects in the image and there is no reason to add false edges on all video sources unless there is something wrong with all video sources.

Any of these patterns can also be used to check whether the display is showing the whole image – if the bars at the left and right of the screen are narrower than the rest, your display is cropping and rescaling the image. As mentioned in section 3.1, see if you can disable this (select dot-by-dot mode in your display).

This is the gray 20-bar pattern – the red, green, blue, and gray/red/green/blue ones are similar:

Black level is one step below the pattern’s darkest bar and full level is one step beyond the brightest bar.

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