Spears & Munsil HD Benchmark and Calibration Disc 2nd Edition by Spears & Munsil

I thought this was gonna be great. But the dolby digital set up that comes with some dvds as special features are actually just as good, but here they give you the glasses to make sure the blues and magentas are correctly displaying. They need to work on back lighting and brightness more, separating the two better in the tests. Back lighting, I found, was not covered very well anywhere, So to make the most of this setup, I'm going to give you some pointers...1. First, set your devices, both the player and your tv too, on cinema or movie mode, and leave them there.2. On the player, use enriched and enhanced rgb settings.3. Back lighting: On the tv, have a wide screen movie on with black bars on the top and bottom. Now, make sure you have a dark scene on pause, so that you can match the dark bars with the black parts of the movie. Set your back lighting to lower settings until you dim the dark spots or shadows in the scene down to equal or just below equal darkness with the black bars showing on top and bottom of the paused movie scene. Now play it a bit and make sure the bars are the same or the tiniest bit darker than the black scenes and shadows in your movie. Now you have your back lighting set up right, and everything will be easier to set up afterwards, and it will extend the life service of your tv's screen.4. Go directly to the cyan blue/magenta test. Use your glasses. My tv had to have the glasses folded twice, as the disk warns you for some tvs, and it worked really well. My color settings were not red enough.5. Brightness. Now is the time to set your brightness levels. Make sure you can see all the details of the squares. It may look dimmer, but trust me, your eyes will thank you for it later, as it not only spares the eyes from seeing a glaring screen at full blast, it helps them to see sharper details in the pictures and videos easier, which also reduces eye strain, and actual headaches. (P.S. I researched the crap out of this just to get my tv looking like the older model lcds did. I miss that tv. Next...6. Sharpness and contrast. You can not, in any way, set these independently. One will always affect the other. Let us first set Sharpness and contrast both to 0, zero, yes, zero. Why? Sharpness is an artificial way to make edges look sharper by adding angles and lines to the picture. If you have an hd tv, then each pixel the tv is sent, is already on the disk. If it is a high quality movie, then each dot is already set at its proper appearance. However, that being said, not all films are that great, even blu-rays, so it does help to up the settings a bit. After we set sharpness and contrast to zero, We find a scene in a movie that is well lit, where you can see a face close up, or better yet, an object, such as a stone carving, or a close up of some grasses. I mean really close up. This is very important. Your close up scenes of faces are what your eyes are going to be judging the clarity on anyway, so faces are good, and easy to find in your movie. However, I started with the opening scene in Stargate, blu-ray, remastered, and was looking for a face, when I found the rock carvings to be a perfect place to fine tune the settings. I turned sharpness up until it looked nice, not perfect. As soon as artifacts and lines became too edgy, I turned it down a bit. You are done there, perfectly done. It won't seem right, but in a few seconds it will.7. Contrast. Contrast is the difference between the light and dark areas in the picture. Contrast should never be set high, it will make your scenes look like spot lights are glaring off of faces and give everything an artificial feel and you actually lose a lot of detail by doing that. So find a face, or a carving, or close up nature picture, pause it, and set contrast up a little, mine was 30 out of hundred, and each little step of the way, you will see sharpness become pin point accurate! for real. There you go. Now your disk was worth the money. :-)

OK, I've used these things before, and thought to get another one and researched it and chunked out three tens to get this one. The calibration disc works well enough but you must realize you're working with your DVD player's image when you're adjusting the details of the screen in front of you. Once you do your best to get that done, you're at a loss as to adjust settings for other input modes. I was hoping to be able to use it somehow, but all you can really do is modify the best settings you have adjusted in DVD player mode on a case by case basis for each of the remaining inputs that you use on your tv. I find the other modes are different than the picture the 4K Sony 3D bluray dvd player that I have in my setup delivers, and there's no way to use the disc for those inputs. So, at best, you should be able to optimize your tv's main settings when in DVD input mode. I have an active 3-D tv and this disc indicated that my polarity was wrong, as what I was seeing was opposite what the disc indicated I should be seeing......what was suppoed to appear in front of the screen was appearing behind, and vice-versa for what was supposed to appear behind was appearing in front of the screen. I searched everywhere for a way to switch polarity and found none, so it leaves me wondering what the ???? am I supposed to do about that?? I thought my 3-D experience was a good one before using the disc to check out my performance in 3-D. Now I'm stuck in limbo wondering if it's all messed up. There's very limited adjustments that can be made on my Sony 65" 850C 4K tv, other than raising brightness to highest of 3 choices, and selecting which double image is seen w/out glasses (horiz or vert) so I really couldn't really alter my tv's 3-D appearance whatsoever. There are many screens that are super strange and way beyond my ability to make good sense of, so the calibration disc does have serious high-tech adjustment setting capabilities for the expert user who has light meters and such, but still only useful in the DVD input mode as far as I can decipher. So, would I buy it again?? Maybe, but I found my basic settings for brightness, contrast, sharpening, color intensity, and hue were almost all just as good as the disc indicated they should be, using just my eyes prior to using the disc. Today's tv's can produce excellent picture quality, and to me it seems discs like this are only kind of useful, not necessary really, to obtain the best picture possible in the DVD input mode. If you shut off all the extra useless stuff loaded on sets out of the box, and adjust according to your eyes for obtaining the right combination of brightness and contrast and sharpness and color intensity, you can arrive at a pretty good image quality. It took me quite a while after I first got my Sony to get where it ended up today for picture quality, so I just can't see the real need for this kind of disc any longer. An expert would be able to make adjustments for all input modes by imposing test patterns in various modes using expert calibration tools and meters, but this disc is only valuable for the basic settings in one mode alone.

Doh! I struggled for hours with what turned out to be the DVD disc and not the second which had all the Blu-ray & 3D magic. The seller was kind and patient - thank you, Stacey - and once the error was nailed my whole experience changed because this is a fantastically effective aid to getting the perfect picture. And sound. And 3D.First, assemble everything you need like pen and paper. You WILL require these. RTFM (read the manual) as this will keep novices calm ‘cause it does require patience. You have to sit in your favourite viewing position (and occasionally get up closer to the screen) with the remote control of the Blu-ray in your left hand (I’m right-handed) and the remote for the TV in your right. The TV remote is the one you’ll use to work the slider controls while the Blu-ray remote takes you through the instructions and patterns.It is worth persevering even if you initially find it daunting.The video appearance settings are fairly straightforward to adjust against the patterns: colour/colour tint; brightness; contrast; sharpness; tones; darkness etc. There’s then a big leap if you wish to calibrate the individual colours (I didn’t need to do this on my Samsung JU7000 TV, thankfully) and you are warned that this bit really is a job for a professional.So far, the picture is amazing, like looking through a window. There are useful clips so you can admire your work. I particularly liked the Big Buck Bunny animated cartoon where every hair, every blade of grass and detail in the shadows can be seen clearly.Think of the disc as an expert holding your hand while you fine-tune to perfection.

Recently bought a 4K Philips tv, wanted to calibrate so contrast, brightness and colour more balanced and natural.The disc has lots I didn’t/haven’t used yet, after adjusting colour, (used the blue filter as tv has blue only adjustable settings) and contrast and brightness the picture is now great, much more natural than out of the box settings, and as have lockable settings (ISF day/night) have saved for all sources. Had to turn on/off HDR on Blu-ray player to set up as different settings for each.Is well worth the money, I previously tried with one from ‘know how’ which cost over double the price and is not as comprehensive.Actual ISF calibration would be better without a doubt, but as also 10x the price minimum, it wasn’t worth paying half the cost of the tv to calibrate. A more expensive tv 4K/OLED would be worth doing.If you have the time and patience to use the disc yourself, you will (imho) get a picture which is fabulous.I still get amazed at it watching HDR and 4K content on Netflix and blue ray and HD content from BT YouView.

TBH after reading all the reviews regarding this product was expecting it to be very easy to use but after the initial setup basic setup contrast/hue/color/brightness etc etc i was hoping for a more in depth explanation on how to tune the TV in whilst using the more advanced test patterns but with no instructions on how to use them i felt let down... I am sure the product is fine in the right hands but if you're not a hi-tec wiz then maybe give this Calibration a miss. BTW I don't consider myself a complete novice when coming to electrically equipment i just hoped for a bit more of guidance from the disk. returned for a refund.

overpriced for the money disc was returned