Greetings,
After I listened briefly to Michael's excellent sound system setup, he is a dangerous man to visit in deed <grin>, my Ladylove and I decided we would like to beef up our somewhat outdated audio video system to HD and some more up to date standards such as blue ray etc.
On the Amp side, I came across something very interesting. I bought an Onkyo TX-SR 876 AV Receiver, and apart from Burr Brown 1796 DAC's on all channels for excellent audio results, I stumbled across the ISF (Imaging Science Foundation) label.
Here a few links:
ONKYO TX-SR876Imaging Science FoundationSo I ordered this Amp yesterday and had a chat with Mark, the Onkyo technical director in the UK. I explained that I have a Gretag MacBeth i1pro and wonder about the ISF implications.
In a nutshell, the story is that you can order a service technician to come out and for 300 sterling he calibrates your screen, add another 50 Sterling for each additional device setup.
So we discussed in what way I could do that myself, and in theory it is possible for anyone with a i1pro or similiar good device. The interesting part is that each input device channel can be calibrated, this means that for Blue Ray, HD Television, game console, whatever you hook up, a seperate calibration can be applied and stored.
When I explained that it takes me about 15 -20 minutes to calibrate my NEC, he mentioned not to expect that kind of speedy process. In fact it can take several hours to fine tune the settings, even for a trained technician, however, the results can increase not only the quality of pictures, but obviously also the life span of the panel. Makes sense to me!
A first in the AV Receivers market, I think Onkyo's bold move is one in the right direction. I don't know whether LCD/Plasma video screens, whether Phillips, Sony, Pioneer, Samsung, whatever, are available that can be hardware calibrated and have a LUT, Look up table like our pro monitors can, but may be this is the start for a future of such screens as well. I would welcome it!
I am going to check back with Karl Koch the MD of BasicColor in Germany to see what his opinion is on the matter, he is one of the top notch people in Europe in terms of CMS. His company actually wrote the Profiler software for the Spectraview series from NEC.
So here we are, CMS has found it's place in Audio Video Receivers, and while Onkyo apparently is the first to offer this, I am somewhat certain others will follow.
Best wishes
Georg
Oceanviewstudio- Ireland
