At last, my Hitachi is calibrated.

[Earle Decker]

Gregg Loewen of Lion Audio/Video calibrated my set this week.

I purchased the set from Circuit City 4 months ago and after running Video Essentials I was very happy with the picture. DVD's looked great and DirecTV was pretty good, some channels looked good and some looked bad. I planned on having the set calibrated, so I didnt do too much tweaking other than DCAM convergence.

In comes Gregg. He arrived at around 7pm and he started to do his magic. First thing he does is convince me to remove the glare shield. I wanted to keep it because I have a 16 month old son, but thankfully I listened to Gregg and removed it. Removing the protective screen made such a huge difference Im surprised that any HDTV's come from the factory with them. I have never seen so many screws, Hitachi really over designed the screen brackets. It took almost an hour to remove the shield and reinstall the other screens.

The next thing he did was line the interior of the set with a heavy black felt. He had me sit in the viewing area and look in the set before and after the lining and I was amazed at the difference. After lining the set it was like looking into a black hole. I was concerned that this step wouldnt make a big difference and wasn't worth the money, but after it was done this thought was gone.

He then cleaned the guns and did a manual and electronic focus. I was surprised how out of focus the guns were.

After putting the set back together Gregg started the calibration.

Setting the grey scale was next. I always thought the set look slightly green, and I could never seem to get rid of the green tint. Its gone now. My greys were pretty green. It was very cool watching him make changes in the ISF menu and watching the green disapear.

Next came contrast and brightness. This seemed pretty straight forward as I have used AVIA and VE before, Gregg just did it in the ISF menu.

I now a TV that has an accurate color decoder. Red push is gone. Again it was really cool to see the changes on his laptop as he adjusted the colors to spec. After this was done Gregg took measurments across the screen and found out that he needed to perform lens stripping. He also noticed earlier in the calibration that Hitachi added some tape the the red lens in a rough attempt at lens stripping. Gregg removed this when he cleaned the 3 guns. After lens stripping the set now measures within 5% uniformity across the screen.

Finally it was time to check the geometry and convergence. According to Gregg my geometry was pretty good and he just made a few adjustments by eye. COnvergence took around 30 minutes as it was off quite a bit now.

Finally done....

We looked up at the clock and realized it was after midnight, so we took a look at a couple of scenes from the superbit version of The Fifth Element...

How does look?

Simply amazed by the difference. DVD's seem to come to life on the screen. I now understand what a properly calibrated image looks like. Colors are so rich and saturated, but at the same time whites are white and blacks are really black. Makes me really want some HD programming.

The detail is amazing, Im seeing things I never noticed before. Its amazing to see the texture of an actors clothes or the fine grain in a stone wall/building.

I just wanted to thank Gregg and share my story with you guys.

Earle

[Bruinsrme]

What part of CT?

I have a 3 yearold Sony xbr400. I think it is in need of a cal. Tweeter sent their tech out for the annual tune up and he plug something into the wall and 30 seconds later he said everything looked fine. Uhmmmmmm

Scott

[ygmn]

HOw Much?

Is that model of hitachi Rear projection?

[Earle Decker]

Im from Wallingford. About 15 min north of New Haven. Are you in Ct also?

Check out his website LIONAV.COM. Prices are listed as well as what a calibration includes.

Earle