Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Avia’s latest entry into TV and audio configuration strikes a fine balance between being friendly to newcomers and satisfying to home theater gurus. Navigating the disc is easy, as it is logically divided into ten main topics that are further divided into chapters. If you are new to home theater, the first few chapters walk you through topics like Home Theater Components, Video Basics, HD Technology, and Making the Connection (hooking up your system)--all in plain English, not in techno-babble.

If you already understand the basics of home theater, it’s easy to skip to the final three chapters to tweak and calibrate every aspect of your system’s audio and video. To really take advantage of the audio test tones, you need a SPL meter, and if you don’t know how to use one, the disc walks you through the process. It also walks you through the most common video test patterns and how to use them to make proper adjustments to the sharpness, brightness, color, tint, and contrast settings on your display. The first time you calibrate your display it will look a lot different than you are used to, but resist the urge to turn the brightness up. By the end of the week, you will appreciate the improved picture and wonder how you were able to watch it before. Just be careful with the included color filters—since they lack a sturdy, cardboard liner, they can be easy to lose. --Adam Gregorich

Product Description

From the makers of Avia and Avia Pro comes the definitive and easy-to-use tutorial for optimizing your home theater. This all-inclusive guide to home theater calibration for NTSC, HD-DVD, Blu-ray or PAL formats comes with more than 200 test patterns to achieve superior video quality and nearly 100 audio tones for 5.1 and 6.1 channels, plus Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus. Basic and advanced signals allow you to select the test pattern or sound tone needed for a specific calibration, and tutorials cover various home theater components, speaker types and placement, making connection and wiring, and using a sound meter and home theater environments.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Helps, but doesn't fully solve setup issues, January 8, 2008

By	Daniel H. Hamilton "danham" (Harwich, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The biggest flaw in this DVD is that its instructions do not necessarily match the setup options available on your TV. Terms like color and white level and sharpness and red push are used but not fully explained, so if your TV uses slightly different terms, like tint, you may be left having to guess how to produce the desired changes. Real pros will go right to the service menu, but the rest of us are left fumbling.

I realize that nobody is expecting Oscar-winning thespians in a setup DVD, but these two guys couldn't deliver a line in a UPS truck. Still, the guy with his shirt un-tucked clearly looks the couch potato part and I get warm feelings of trust when I hear him speak, based on the many hours he obviously spends in front of a wide screen.

On the plus side, even their somewhat hurried cue-card presentations of color and TV technology are nonetheless good enough that you can probably skip the test patterns and follow advice such as turning down the sharpness (which most people adjust way too high) and get a decent picture using your own eyeballs.

But that brings into question the price. I don't feel ripped off, but neither would I quickly recommend spending this amount of money when you can find much of the same info (absent the useful test patterns) online for free.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars vast improvement on tv color, March 5, 2008

By	Ryan W "ryanmw" - See all my reviews

My sharp aquos looked good as soon as i got it out of the box. About a month later, i decided to take the plunge and purchase this calibration dvd. After viewing the test patterns and using the color filters, i noticed a significant difference in how much better the color is. i didn't notice so much of a difference in the other settings as far as sharpness and contrast go. Even after setting the brightness with the dvd, i ended up bumping it up just a bit for daytime viewing.

I didn't get much out of the audio adjustments on my surround sound system. i got more out of the adjustments from simply using my receiver manual and remote.

In the end, after seeing other folks LCD tvs, i can tell mine has been adjusted properly with the test patterns. This was something i didn't notice until i saw someone elses tv and it was obvious the saturation needed to be adjusted.

All in all, it was a good investment. Not quite sure it was worth the $35 or so i paid for it, but my tv looks even that much better now that i have used it.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Unimpressed, January 20, 2008

By	Lisa M. Roller (MN, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I own the original DVD and thought I would update to this 2nd version. A mistake. The quality of the DVD is poor in both video quality, menu quality, and it comes free of charge with some bugs. The explaination of the test paterns was better in the original, in fact, after attempting to use this DVD, I went back to the original to make sure I had not screwed things up too much.

Bottom line - if you have access to the original buy it, borrow it... But if you do not, this one is better then nothing.