E Unit

Price has dropped to $28.99 on Amazon right now. Great, NOW they lower the price.

E Unit

Not sure why, but this has a new release date.

http://www.amazon.com/WOW-World-Of-W...1667063&sr=8-4

Mike UFC

Disney is re-releasing with one disc. The Nature disc won't be in the re-release.

steebo777

I love this calibration disc, actually surprised me quite a bit how good it was.

RocShemp

I need to order the 2-disker ASAP.

bluetoast

If anybody has the Home Video Essentials calibration disc as well as this, can you compare the two? If I already have the former, do I need this?

Kal-El

Hehe. My co-worker's wife got him this for their anniversary and I just borrowed it from him. Surprisingly, I only had to do minor tweaks to my TV.

RocShemp

Do you mean Digital Video Essentials? I have that. But I've been using AVS HD 709 more. But I'll compare them for you once I get the Disney WOW disc.

RocShemp

My copy finally arrived yesterday and I immediately fired it up.

I didn't really pay much attention to the audio tests so I'll stick to the video side.

The disc is rather informative about HD video in general and is definitely more user friendly than DVE. However, you can see the Disney market research team's fingerprints all over the disk. In fact, certain "features" on the disc are nothing more than promo spots for Disney BD's and their BD Live features. They even throw in a promo for digital copies. This'd be no big deal if it weren't for the fact that these "features" are found in sections that are meant to inform people about HD video and proper connections. There's even a section dedicated to shill season 5 of Lost on BD.

As for the patterns themselves, the basic brightness and contrast patterns, though simple to use, were useless for me since they don't take into account older HD sets (like mine) that default to full range (PC) rather than limited range (TV) since that means I cannot see any below black or above white content. Here both Disney WOW and DVE are even. AVS HD 709 beats them both since its brightness and contrast patterns take into account both types of sets.

However, the advanced test patterns on Disney WOW (divided by TV format - plasma/LCD, CRT, projection, etc. - you use) are more friendly for my type of set. It uses a series of geometric shapes that flash (similar to the flashing bar patterns of AVS HD 709), move (neat but weird at first), and brighten up (more annoying than useful) every so often. It should be noted that there is an advanced static bar pattern on DVE that's more PC friendly but slightly less helpful than the flashing patterns of Disney WOW or AVS HD 709. In this case, despite the silly decision to make the contrast and brightness patterns brighten up every so often on Disney WOW, I'd rank Disney WOW and AVS HD 709 as pretty even and better than DVE.

For setting color and tint, DVE uses squares against a grey background and Disney WOW uses a bar pattern. Neither is as user friendly as the flashing squares within color bars pattern found on AVS HD 709. I'd place Disney WOW and DVE even with regards to the patterns themselves, with AVS HD 709 besting them both. However, DVE includes three color filters (red, green, and blue) which are wide enough to look through both eyes whereas Disney WOW only includes one small blue color filter that you use like a monocle. AVS HD 709 does not include any color filters (since it's a program you download free from the internet) though it requires a blue filter (or a TV that features a "blue mode") in order to properly set up color and tint.

I was never fond of the sharpness test pattern on DVE. It always looked to me like there was some inherent ringing in the pattern that made it difficult to assess what was being added by my set's sharpness setting. However, the pattern on AVS HD 709 was far more useful in that regard. As for Disney WOW, the area for sharpness on the pattern they provide is so small that I found it completely useless.

The overscan patterns on all three discs are pretty easy to use and equally useful. The Disney WOW overscan pattern includes more steps so I guess its technically the most useful in determining how much overscan your set has.

In terms of expert patterns, although Disney WOW includes some interesting stuff like stress tests and whatnot, it's actually very lite in that department. I didn't find any IRE windows like those found on DVE nor did I find any patterns designed for use with electronic calibration tools like ColorHCFR, CalMAN, or ChromaPure (which are found in AVS HD 709).

There was one cool feature on Disney WOW called a "pixel flipper" which is supposed to help correct stuck pixels on LCD sets and correct burn-in on Plasma sets (and seems a far more elegant solution that simply "burning" a completely white image on a Plasma screen). Though I didn't have time to test it fully since the instructions recommend to leave it on for an hour.

The Disney WOW disc also includes clips from movies presumably to help you evaluate your results but it comes across as more of a shill for their products (and even includes a "retailer loop" that does nothing but advertise Disney BD's nonstop). Also, the clips are poorly chosen if user evaluation was the concern. The vast majority of the clips are CGI animated fare. Sure such clips are great for selling TV's (animation makes even poorly calibrated sets look "good") but are piss poor for evaluating how well you calibrated your set.

There are a few live action clips but the choices are questionable. One is a clip of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End that has been cropped to 1.78:1 (a questionable decision since an early tutorial in the disc explaoned that some wider movies will still be letterboxed on BD). Then there are three clips from Surrogates that push the color red and DNR so far that it'd simply make you wonder if you completely screwed up your calibration. There are also three clips from G-Force that look average at best (which is exactly how the actuall BD looks as well). Finally there's the only useful live action clip which comes from The Prestige. However, despite it looking more "natural" than the other live action clips, it's not the best scene to use. There's a lot of soft focus in the scene and, although there is some solid detail, is not really that great for evaluation. They should have instead used the scene when Hugh Jackman is tailing Christian Bale after the Tesla expo. That scene features a lot of wide shots that still show off a lot of intricate detail while still keeping the dark aesthetic of that particular film.

Oh and the Goofy tutorial at the beiginning is pure crap. It's a static wall of cartoon TV's and speakers with clips butchered from the great Goofy home theater short. They simply poorly spliced in clips from other Goofy shorts and added to the narration of the original short to basically make a sales pitch for BD. The other videos that actually discuss audio and video are far more informative, though they feel a tad antiquated. In fact, despite the quality of the test patterns (and the ad for season 5 of Lost), the whole program feels like it was produced back when Blu-Ray first came to the market. They even advertise the first Sony Blu-Ray player and the fat PS3.

The second disc is a lot more useful for evaluation purposes. It's a series of nature videos but they are from varied sources. Some look like upscaled 720p, others are obviously interlaced video, and others still seem to actually be sourced from 1080p video. It's a great way to see how different types of HD video look on your set. Also, some of the audio tracks are DTS 48/24 stereo whilst a few are actually 96/24 5.1 DTS-HD MA tracks.

E Unit

Just a heads up - Amazon has this for $18.49. And this is for the 2 disc set, which is the cheapest I've seen it.

http://www.amazon.com/Disney-WOW-Wor...wonder+blu+ray

hanshotfirst1138

I just picked this up, hopefully it'll help me calibrate.

mattysemo247

What's the difference between the two?

EDIT: Looks like this is it. "The second disc on the blu-ray called Visions: Inspired By Nature is a stunning HD demo reel. There are scenes of waterfalls, an ocean sunset, flower fields, desert vistas, mountain vistas, a fireplace scene, plus more. You can play each individual scene or run a loop. The second disc is approximately 64 minutes long. The second disc is something you can play in the background if you are having guests over or play it while reading a book or just relaxing."

bluetoast

Wow, Roc Shemp sorry I didn't catch your response earlier, but thanks for the comparison man!

RocShemp

Hey, no problem. I hope it helped, even if you saw it late.

Funny enough, I actually forgot I posted all that.

hanshotfirst1138

Picked up the disc and I'm watching all of the basic technical info, no wonder I'm such a moron, I was a Luddite about even the most basic stuff . I feel like moron of the week.

PhantomStranger

The guy that created this disc used to post regularly on AVS. The Blu-ray market seems to have a number of different video test discs.

hanshotfirst1138

Fascinating. This sounds like a cool job, I won't lie . I'm fiddling with the disc now, see what my dumb ass can improve. I'm still having trouble with it though, I don't think I have sharp enough eyes to be tuned to everything. And I haven't even gotten to any of the advanced stuff yet. Perhaps I have shamed myself by attending this forum.

RocShemp

Yeah. He even answered questions in the review thread for the disc: http://www.avsforum.com/forum/187-of...l#post30840754

OldBoy

ok, i'm sorry, but i put this in to finally calibrate my set and wtf? i have no idea what to do and how to do it. i listen to the directions and instructions or whatever, but when it came to calibrate i had no fucking clue what to do...

can anyone help?

Josh Z

Repeat Step 1.

E Unit

Minus the whatever part. Keep in mind, calibration discs isn't something that's automated. You don't put the disc in and it spits out calibration results. You need to really pay attention to the directions in working through them.

Dan

Because of this bump, I checked out how much these discs are going for on ebay...

So... Oldboy... if you have no use for this thing, want to send it my way?
(Hell, even just to borrow it. I'll send it back)

jjcool

If only there was some online resource that you could type in a string of terms you were looking for that yielded results. Something like "how to use blu ray calibration disc".

islandclaws

You DO know who you're talking about, right? We've enabled him. This is his Google now.

Trevor

I used to cut him a break until I saw him flame newbies with similar silly questions, multiple times. The hypocrisy makes me think he may be Donald Trump.