Prior to sitting down to view that yearly bacchanal of violence and beer last night, the SAG Awards (I TiVo-ed it, natch), I decided to whip out the SpyderTV by Datacolor to calibrate my 56-inch JVC DLP. One of the major issues I’ve always had with this HD TV is that standard definition TV always looks washed out and messy, especially when running through the TiVo. In order to at least fix some of the color errors, I went into the set-up menu and proceeded to ruin the color even more. Thankfully, SpyderTV was able to steer me back to an acceptable mix of brightness, contrast, and tint.
The device comes with a colorimeter, a test pattern DVD, and a program disk. It works only under Windows and connects to the meter to test different colors and patterns on your TV screen.
You begin by entering your TV model and current settings, including color temperature and all of the color and brightness settings. The system then asks you to skip back and forth on the test pattern DVD to pick brightness and tint levels, allowing you to watch in real time as the system calculates your optimum settings.
Before SpyderTV all of the colors on the DLP were too “hot” and bright and had a definite yellow tint to them. After the calibration, which took about 30 minutes, the HD picture was extremely true to live and even the pixellated SD picture became acceptable. Even the Wii and the 360 looked better with the new settings. Not bad for a few minutes work.
Datacolor sells the Spyder for $229 online. If you are a home theatre buff and want to make sure you’re seeing what you’re supposed to be seeing, it’s not a bad investment. Clearly this is a one-time use thing, but if you go through a TV or two every few years then it might be a good investment. Perhaps you could sell your services as a home TV calibrator on Craigslist?
older HD’s especially rear projections can change over time with the life of the bulb. We have had our toshiba HD tv calibrated by professionals when we got it a few years ago. Since we have added a plasma and ran the Spyder on that TV with great results and went to the older toshiba HD and found the color wasn’t as good as it was a few years ago and reran the Spyder on the toshiba to find the settings quite different than they were jotted down by the pro installers. I do realize a difference in the tools used to calibrate, but the picture is once again back to the right colors and settings. So I have found multiple uses for it in the last 7 months i have had the Spyder….
Plus go to your friends house and make them buy you dinner for maximizing the performance of their HD sets…
JVC does not make a DLP TV. JVC makes LCoS based units, which they call D-ILA. It is LCD based, and is *NOT* DLP based. Only units built around the Texas Instruments DLP Chip are DLP TV’s. DLP units are not LCD based, like the LCoS used in JVC D-ILA and the Sony SXRD.