232V Calibration and Bench Testing

We began our calibration by using the Digital Video Essentials Pro discs and set our Contrast, Brightness and Sharpness. This is the first step where we noticed some shortcomings with the user controls. When attempting to set the Brightness, just one click went from being able to clearly see all 3 dark bars on the test pattern to being able to see only one. This forced us to make a decision on which side of right we wanted to set our brightness. A similar problem with fineness of control was found in trying to set the Contrast. In attempting to set the White levels we were never able to produce whiter than white levels.

We used Datacolor’s Colorfacts Professional 6.0 software to measure the 232V's performance in various modes and Color temperature settings. The CIE Color chart shows the 232V is pretty close to right on with both red and blue, but is a little deficient in green. We should point out however that two very important factory presets in the Picture menu that need to be changed to set the display for home use. Under Picture/Mode there are two options (Home and Power Up). The factory default is Power Up (so it looks as bright as possible when powered up in show room settings); but as usual, the preferred setting for use in our home was, oddly enough, Home. The other factory default we recommend changing is also in the Picture menu under the submenu Color Temperature. The two options are Native (the factory default) and 6500K. Prior to changing this default, we got a color temperature of around 9200 (again heavy blue in an attempt to make it stand out in the showroom). Making this simple change gave us a measurement of 6255K, much closer to the goal of 6500K.

We prefer displays be capable of producing at least 400:1 contrast. This display couldn't quite live up to that expectation and produced the following ANSI contrast readings in our room:

• Dark Room 273:1
• Medium Room 271:1
• Bright Room 269:1

When we first tested the RGB performance out of the box prior to making these changes the display showed a heavy bias toward blue. Simply changing the mode setting to Home, and the Color Temp to 6500K brought the blue back down and we got a very acceptable grayscale performance with this setting. You can see the RGB levels look pretty stable across the entire spectrum from about 10 IRE through 90 IRE. Unfortunately, there are no User calibration controls for RGB Cut and Gain so other than making a few basic changes there is little you can do to alter the out of the box RGB performance.

With the color temperature set to 6500K (rather than native) the color temperature of the display also stayed pretty stable in the range of 6300K. Not bad, actually, though some prefer a picture that is a bit less red.

The Gamma reading (1.49) was a bit off the target of 2.2 to 2.5 and it suffers slightly from S-curve issues. As a result the blacks do not get black quickly enough and then the whites take off a little to quickly. I could quickly see why my Contrast and Brightness settings resulted in quick clipping of the top and bottom end.

Audioholics/HQV Bench Testing Summary of Test Results

Comments on HQV Testing

Not a great score, but really pretty solid at the important things like Film Detail and 2:3 cadence tests. The jaggies tests really exposed some weakness on producing straight lines. So you are really going to want to feed this display a good progressive signal (480p or 720p) to really enjoy great video.