CALIBRATION FAQS

As a Charter member of the Imaging Science Foundation, ISFTV has more experience than most companies calibrating for both the consumer and the professional markets. ISFTV has been performing professional calibration for over 20 years since the inception of the ISF in early 1994, supporting post productions facilities, A/V integrators, corporate clients, and end users. Experience combined with state-of-the-art test equipment and the best software equals unparalleled results.

If you are interested in getting the best performance and most accurate pictures from a given display, then professional calibration is absolutely necessary. The goal is to reproduce a picture as close as possible to the film director’s creative work, and therefore enhance the viewing experience. We also prefer that the client be present during the procedure, as we believe that educating the consumer is an important part of the calibration process.

This is an excellent question that we get on an almost daily basis. A full blown calibration would be much too costly for manufacturers to be able to meet their price points. Prior to calibration, a certain amount of use for break-in is recommended in order to stabilize the display for the best possible results, which is generally between 75 and 200 hours depending on the display type. Additionally, a thorough full professional calibration takes somewhere between 2 and 4 hours to complete depending on the display and the video system, which would be a prohibitively long period of time on the manufacturing assembly line where tasks performed at workstations are typically limited to 30 to 45 seconds.

More importantly, a professional calibration should be a system-wide setup, which entails all sources being set up correctly (cable boxes, satellite receivers, Blu-ray players, etc.) according to the industry standards.

Is it time to jump into the new UHD 4K world? That is the latest question. While we believe UHD is the future of our television system, most current UHD displays are not capable of fully taking advantage of all that the redefined UHD system will offer, such as P3 wide color gamut, 10 to 12-bit processing, and higher color resolution. Further complicating matters is the fact that few displays, and AVRs (Audio Video Receivers) are HDCP 2.2 compliant, thus they won’t be able to play UHD Blu-ray when it becomes available unless they can be updated.

While we do not have a written guarantee, ISFTV will do whatever is necessary to make your calibration experience a positive one.