So I know you can have "professionals" come out and for a few hundred dollars play around with your tv and make the picture look better. Has anyone had this done before? Is it really worth it to thrown down $100-200 for someone to do this? How much of a difference can it really make?

I also know there are calibration cd's out there where you can do it by yourself but apparently these professionals go a step beyond this....

Professionals use equipment that in a controlled lighting area, they use an actual little machine to measure your color accuracy. It's linked to a laptop or something I believe so they can see charts or whatever on your accuracy, too. But if you visit the AVSForums, usually popular TV's have threads created where users there use such equipment to calibrate their own sets. They post the settings for you, and you can adjust to your liking.

Not only a little machine to measure the color, but also a signal source machine to give specific color signals. So the measurement can accurately be matched to the source to make sure the TV is really displaying properly.

With CRT TVs, every tube is different so this was a huge benefit. Plus, the service menu was generally a real trip to use. Now that everything has gone digital with simple menus, and things like LCD are less varied from one unit to the other, it is becoming less useful. Copying from AVS is indeed pretty cool.

Pros are still pretty useful if you have a digital projector, as the lamps are not perfectly consistent even if the liquid crystal (LCD) or color wheels (DLP) are. Although I've just gone the AVS route, myself.

I agree with Spiky (as I typically do). For both my projector and LCD flat panel I copied several different recommended at AVS for each display and played around with them. AVS is so vast you can often not only find things about your specific display, but also your sources.

Sdallnct: Could you please post the settings you settled with for your Samsung LCD? I'm still trying to find the perfect settings for mine.

I have the LNT 4661 which I believe is last years model and the lowest in their line. I used the "famous" 1500 post at AVS for this model. It is actually now post 1499 since someone deleted a post. I used these exact setting with one very minor modification. If you have the LNT 46XX I highly recommend this as a starting point.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...ration&page=38

However if you have another series. Find the thread for that one and start with those settings.