December 18, 2009 | by Steven Castle

by Brent Butterworth

I swear, I will never put in a home theater for anyone ever again. I’m just going to tell them to go to a pro.

Thanks to my experience in wiring, carpentry, etc., family and friends often call on me to install their home theater gear. I review gear for a living, so the gear itself I can handle. It’s the control system that keeps me on the phone with them for hours, or has me rushing to their homes minutes before the Super Bowl or the Oscars.

All because they can’t figure out how to work the system. Or more accurately, because I can’t figure out how to build a system they can work.

Sure, there are lots of universal remotes that can, in theory, control an entire home theater system. But they have problems. Most consumers can’t figure out that they have to switch inputs when they want to watch a DVD instead of cable TV. Many can’t remember that they have to hit the DVD button on the remote when they want to control the DVD player.

Sure, you can set the remote control up for macros, where it performs a whole bunch of operations at the touch of one button. But the fact that most gear has just a single power button tends to flummox most macros. If the TV is off but the cable box is on, any macro that tries to turn them both on will shut the cable box off.

I did program a fairly fancy touchscreen remote for a friend of mine a few years ago. (He bought it from Amazon.) Unfortunately, this remote is still primitive enough that I had to get really creative when I programmed it. And the more creative the installer has to be, the less reliable the home theater system usually is. So still, I get the calls. He’s on his second touchscreen now and I refuse to program a third.

Control systems from companies like AMX, Control4, and Crestron solve these problems easily. These systems can monitor whether a device in your system is on or off, so they never shut it off accidentally. They can be programmed with simple commands like “Watch a Movie” instead of requiring you to remember how to work the system. And the installer can leave off the complex, confusing options that cause most people to mess up their systems.

Best of all, these systems are reliable. Yes, they can break, but it’s not like you’ll be calling your installer once a week because you can’t get the TV going.

These control systems aren’t cheap, and you can only get them through custom installers. But you’ll find them well worth every penny. After all, what’s the point of saving a few thousand on your fancy home theater system if you can’t figure out how to work it?

by Brent Butterworth
A new generation of projectors promises to fix every problem we ever had with video projection. Based on the time I’ve recently spent with a couple of these machines, it looks like the promises have been fulfilled.

These new projectors use LEDs as a light source instead of the UHP lamps that other projectors use. LEDs offer all sorts of advantages over lamps. The biggest one is that LEDs never need replacing—unlike lamps, which need to be replaced every 2,000 to 3,000 hours. That means a huge cost savings over the course of several years. Manufacturers rate the lifetime of the LEDs anywhere from 20,000 hours to practically forever (even though they’re all using the same LEDs).

Supposedly, the performance of LEDs doesn’t change much over time. But lamps start to dim and shift color after about 1,000 hours, necessitating frequent readjustment of the picture controls.

LEDs can also deliver deeper black levels and better contrast. Many lamp-based projectors use an automatic iris to get deep blacks; the iris closes down automatically during dark scenes to make the blacks darker. Problem is, you can often see the iris working. LEDs don’t need the iris, because they can be dimmed almost instantly to any level. Based on what I’ve seen so far, the speedy operation of the LEDs can indeed eliminate the “pumping” and flickering you sometimes see with auto iris mechanisms.

That’s a lot of advantages, right? Well, there’s more.

Because LED projectors use separate red, green, and blue LEDs instead of a white lamp shining through a rotating color filter wheel, the “color fringing” effect you see on most DLP projectors is eliminated. And because LEDs can deliver more intense, saturated color, you can set the projectors up for an ultra-vivid picture. Some will say it’s unrealistic, but I’ve grown addicted to the look after living with it for a few weeks.

This first generation of LED projectors warms up in 40 seconds, only about a third of the time it takes for a lamp-based projector to fire up. And when you shut them off, they go off instantly because unlike lamps, they don’t need to be cooled down gradually by a fan.

The time I recently spent with the Digital Projection M-Vision Cine LED convinced me that LED is the wave of the future for video projection. It’s a shame that only a small handful of people are getting to enjoy the rich hues of the Winter Olympics on an LED projector, but I’m glad I’m one of them.

How video calibration works – and why you want it

by Brent Butterworth

I’ve spoken with many people who are shocked to learn they have to spend hundreds of dollars extra to have their theater’s video projector professionally calibrated. I can sympathize. After all, who among us hasn’t brought a brand-new TV home, plugged it in, turned it on, and never once touched the picture adjustments?

I can’t tell you a fancy calibration process is going to make The Biggest Loser any more captivating. But when you’re watching movies, accurate color reproduction and crisp detail draw really help draw you into the story, especially with a projection system. Achieving this level of performance is an incredibly complicated process for which most amateurs are no more qualified than they would be to do a brake job on their car.

The very first thing a calibration technician does is make sure your system is hooked up correctly. There’s a huge benefit here that doesn’t often get discussed—you can be sure all of your devices (Blu-ray player, cable box, etc.) are set for the optimum resolution for your projector. The tech’s also going to make sure the proper cables are used and that they’re all installed correctly. You can rest assured knowing you’re not one of the millions of people watching standard-definition video when they could be getting high definition.

Then the tech will check the physical installation of the TV, making sure that the screen is level and unobstructed. If it’s a projection system, the tech will check to see that the image is properly zoomed, centered, and focused.

Next, the tech will make basic adjustments to such controls as brightness, contrast, and sharpness, using either a special test DVD or a video signal generator.

Now comes the complicated part, where the tech adjusts the grayscale of the display. Grayscale is actually a function of the mix of red, green, and blue in the display. Get the mix right and you’ll get a perfectly neutral gray (or black or white), and all your other colors should fall into line, too. Get the mix wrong and the blacks, grays, and whites might look blue. Or they might look red. Or the blacks might look greenish while the whites look purple. This process takes anywhere from about 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on how bad the TV looks at the start, and it involves test equipment costing $5,000 to $15,000.

On many newer TVs and projectors, the tech will be able to adjust the specific colors of red, green, and blue, to assure that the TV’s delivering the full range of color of which it’s capable.

There are other steps, too, and the more features manufacturers add to their TVs and projectors every year, the more things the calibration technician needs to check.

I’ve been through the calibration training program run by the Imaging Science Foundation three times, and I review projectors on a regular basis, yet I still find the calibration process complicated and challenging. Sure, if you’re really tech-savvy and wanted to invest in the necessary test gear, you could do the job yourself. But by the time you get good at it, you’ll probably be ready to buy a whole new display.

By John Sciacca

Television manufacturers are a busy bunch, continually pushing the envelope with nary a moment’s rest on their technological laurels. In the past two years, everything we thought we knew about a good TV has been completely turned inside out. What was once the state of contemporary cool at 4-inches thick is now morbidly obese as sets are being measured in millimeters. Just as we’ve adjusted to 720p and then 1080p resolutions, we must prepare our eyes for the hyper-realism of 4K resolution. While our ancestors lived for years in the Stone Ages of 60-Hertz refresh rates, we have been shown the benefits of 120, 240 and now 480-Hertz. And where contrast ratios used to be boast numbers like 10,000 to 1, they have now reached infinity, exceeding staring into a black hole and the sun with the Hubble telescope. And, remarkably, while all of these advancements have occurred, prices have steadily plummeted. It won’t be long before you’ll pull a 42-inch Plasma from a box of Cracker Jacks, only to trade it for the rubber bouncy ball that you really wanted.

This means that it’s time to talk about the next trend that will capture your video dollars: 3D. Several manufacturers are fervently pursuing the third dimension (depth, in case you were curious) in hopes of continuing to capture that almighty fourth D, Dollars. Both Samsung and LG see 3D as the major catalyst to jumpstarting TV and Blu-ray sales. Mitsubishi has been showing 3D demos w ith its DLP and Laser TV for some time. JVC and Digital Projection had 3D demos at this past CEDIA, and even Dolby Laboratories is getting involved.

But the most aggressive 3D-ers seem to be Panasonic and Sony. (For the record, having watched demos from all of the manufacturers, I find Panasonic’s version of 3D to be the best. To my eyes, it was the sharpest, with the best focus, detail and depth of image.) Both companies plan on launching 3D sets next year and are already laying on the trash-talk pretty thick. Additionally, Sony is releasing an update that will provide a 3D mode for all PS3 games. Sony says, “The 3D train is on the track, and we’re the ones to drive it home.”

Panasonic countered, “A lot of people think Blu-ray is Sony. We believe 3D is Panasonic.”

I believe the next quote will start out, “Yo’ mama so fat…” but I’ve been unable to confirm.

According to the research firm, GigaOM, sales of 3D sets will reach up to 46 million by 2013 and, as 3D becomes a standard feature, it will have just a slight price premium over non-3D models. With support coming from Hollywood in the form of major 3D releases (including James Cameron’s highly anticipated Avatar), it seems like the transition to the home market is inevitable.