Customer Reviews

Monster/ISF HDTV Calibration Wizard DVD

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(31)

 

 

Marc Anderson's review below hits the nail on the head. This is possibly the most useless TV tool and/or calibration tool that has ever been marketed. It is about as high tec as a plastic pair of 3-D glasses and about as useful also. When you buy a calibration disc you are not interested in someone's singing career or her "cutsy" expressions about calibration. This really is a disc that explains the 4-5 basic components of TV calibration whilst leaving the viewer hanging at the point where more info. is necessary. It may be helpful to someone who has not owned a color TV in the last 45 years but otherwise there is no value added. It is certainly easy to use because there is nothing really to use. Absolutely terrible!

This DVD is okay. It does what it advertises, but there are much better calibration DVDs out there. This DVD doesn't contain any audio calibration, which is what I also wanted. Some of the calibration on the DVD is too subjective for my taste. I really thought the music video at the end was rather pointless. If you're a guy with a short attention span, this DVD will probably work for you.

I found that "The AVIA Guide to Home Theater" DVD was much better. The AVIA DVD provides much less subjective calibration. It contains audio calibration. It contains suggestions on the types of cables to use, and other helpful suggestions for setting up your home theater. The only downside of the AVIA DVD was that it wasn't widescreen, unlike this widescreen DVD, but in reality the widescreen video is only useful if you're too blind to notice that your aspect ratio on the TV is causing circles to look like ovals.

Personally, I thought this Monster/ISF DVD was a waste of my money.

Don't waste your money on this. It seems the only reason this DVD was made was to feature someone's girlfriend's video. It's nothing more than...if you see an X on the screen your brightness is set too high and the girl in the middle should look good while the one one the right looks pasty. Now your done let's watch a terrible music video.

This DVD is as big of a ripoff as $150 HDMI cables. As one reviewer pointed out, I would not lend or recommend this DVD to my friends. The setup is so basic and limited as to be a waste of time. I did a better job of adjusting my settings without this DVD than with it. It helps you adjust a whopping four settings: brightness, contrast, tint/hue and sharpness. Wow, all the settings my 1975 Philips console TV had. They needed to make a DVD to show me how to set the tint so that people don't show up green? Don't even ask about the "music video" on here. That was probably the most insulting part of the whole video, with the possible exception of the Monster exec on the DVD telling you what a star this bimbo is going to be. If I could get my money back on this I would. Please don't spend your money on this product.

Having used other video calibration disks before (the Digital Essentials and a few others I can't recall), I have to say that this DVD isn't worth the plastic it's encoded on. There is basically no real information, and the set-up is guided by some wanna-be pop star who goes out of her way to make the whole process as non-technical as possible by removing any indication of what you're actually trying to achieve. The few calibrations they have you work through are basic at best, and they entirely skip over color calibration. Pure uselessness.

I see too many people giving negative reviews of this disc. Initially I was sort of mad at the salesman that sold me this disk because I expressed my displeasure of all things "Monster". Yeah they sell overpriced cables and they use a lot of hype when promoting their products but this disc was actually pretty useful. Look, I don't have $400 to spend on getting my system professionally calibrated but I did want my TV to look as good as I could get it. As one reviewer had said the video is slightly annoying but my TV looks fantastic. The menus are easy to use, the narration is easy to follow and for $25 you really can't beat the price.

I have a full time job and I have too many things going on in my life to become an expert on matters of all things HDTV. I am sure some of the more technical discs are great but this took me all of maybe 12 minutes. It showed me how to adjust my black levels (which is very important from what I am told), adjust my brightness and set my color correctly. I am sure it could be better and I may hire someone in the future to calibrate my system but this disc does the job it was intended to do. If you are like me and bought a nice home theater and want it to look good go ahead and buy this disc. It's easy, does a good job and is endorsed by the ISF. That is the bottom line.

Color me stupid
Save you money and your time.
Thirty dollars for 20 minutes?? HAH!! Just like every other Monster product; overpriced and over-rated. Save you money buy a
real calibration DVD.
If I could give it back, I would.
Don't be sucked in by the name....

I ordered this dvd after reading that I might not be getting the best picture from my new high def LCD. I have an Olevia tv and tuned the settings myself using a couple of animated movies such as Shrek and Finding Nemo.

However, I decided to order this since it was supposed to help you fine tune your tv picture without the high price tag of some calibration discs that run up to $400.

This dvd breaks down the calibration into about 8 seperate menus, and really only 4 or so are relevant to calibrating your settings. The first one tunes your black color to the deepest possible black, the next to the whitest white. Sharpness, contrast, and ratio are some other tests included.

However, I found all my settings to be correct for the most part, just by trusting my eyes while watching my other dvd's. I only changed my sharpness, and I think I only took it down one notch. This wouldn't be too bad, except the user of this disc has to suffer through a highly annoying narration of the discs content by the host, Jenna Drey.

The icing on the cake comes when you have "the privilege" of watching Jenna's awful music video, which claims to be the first music video ever done in HD, at the end of the disc. Instead of crisp HD however, the video is shot with a "glamor" filter...the kind that gives that soft fuzzy overtone, which completely defeats the purpose of HD in my opinion. Top it off with a shirtless, kilt-wearing man wielding a pool cue and you have one TERRIBLE music video.

Anyway, bottom line: good for the money if you have no idea what you're doing with your high def television, but if you are even somewhat capable of watching a movie and saying, "the blue sky looks green, I bet I can fix that" then you probably don't need this disc.

The majority of the proceeding reviews appear to be very negative - I only wished that I had read them before making a purchase from what I had considered to be a reputable supplier of audio and video equipment.
After listening to the nauseating narration during my initial viewing, I turned the sound off!
There are nine chapters; I resorted to using only five. [I prefer to call them what they really are!]
3/ Brightness
4/ Contrast
5/ Hue or Tint
6/ Sharpness
7/ Picture Size
Maybe I was just lucky when I received my new 42" plasma TV, as all I had to do was plug it in and complete auto setup, the results were set exactly the way the HDTV Calibration Wizard demonstrated. One can easily define black buttons on a black shirt beneath a black coat. Contrast was perfect and the faces showed the correct hue or tint. Sharpness shows no shadows and no blurred edges. The picture size or format was exactly as depicted for a 16:9 ratio image.
In my opinion the set up videos are the most basic and can be accomplished with any well-known DVD movie. Keep in mind, if this disc is recorded under ideal studio conditions, you will not necessarily see the results repeated from your local HDTV stations or satellite signals.

I do not know if it would be technically feasible but to be able to display the various resolution sources. Be it interlaced or progressive at 1080, 720, 480 or regular 525 line could be useful.
Depending on which network you may be watching the source material varies greatly between commercials, live and recorded broadcasts. The HDTV standards themselves vary when CBS, NBC and PBS broadcast 1080 interlaced and ABC and Fox choose 720 progressive. Unless you have a 1080p HDTV and a Blu-ray HD-DVD player or PlayStation 3 you will not be able to display 1080 progressive image. My progressive scan DVD with component video will only display 480 lines progressive.
Do not worry, unless you are sitting very close to your HDTV you probably will not notice the difference.
Picture size is my pet peeve. This calibration disc is designed for 16:9 ratio only. Why the TV industry chose this is a mystery to me as the majority of wide screen movies of today are produced with a 2.35:1 ratio. Other variations will occur when viewing some of the old "Cinemascope" movies. With a "correctly" set up HDTV a black band at both the top and the bottom of the image will be normal. Classic movies filmed in the old 4:3 aspect ratio will, of course, be presented with black bands both to the left and right.
In my opinion this HDTV Calibration Wizard does not even scratch the surface for a video display system. The omission of any calibration settings for Dolby, DTS or THX audio systems is also seen as a serious drawback.
I also object to having to pay, what I consider, an inflated price for a commercial to Monster Cable Products Inc. Whether or not I may see any improvement with the use of these cables remains to be seen.

I normally don't write reviews, but this was a HUGE let down. When the disc indicated that I was at the end of the calibration, my jaw dropped. I though that I was only getting started. Please save your money for something else that has more than a few setting adjustments.