In related news, I used my eyes to visually calibrate your website, and will be billing you for this invaluable service.

You're welcome.

You mean you are going to do your good duty as a nuisance customer and just go away?

No seriously, in the immortal vocab of this site: chargeback. I'm not sure what exactly you talked to the first salesperson about doing for service, but I'm guessing thet did not fulfill their side of the agreement. Use that against them.

I do hope he gets his money back, but I agree with Meg. If you are that worried about what your friends say, just pretend you had it done. As the old adage goes, "if it isn't broke, don't fix it."

you're a sucker for paying the $100 in the first place

Most Pixar Films and TXT certifed films have a TV callibration tool in the special features. One movie that I know has it is Monsters, Inc. I use that movie to set up all my TVs.

$100 to futz around with a TV remote? Why am I not a Firedog tech?

I always laugh a little at stories about tv calibration. Being mostly colorblind (is that like mostly harmless?) I always find it rather amusing.

There's this weird phenomenon I've noticed around HDTVs. People don't want to buy what looks good to them, they want other people to come in and tell them which TV looks the "best" and set it up the "best" way.

Paying for TV color calibration is completely idiotic unless you're some sort of professional who creates or distributes content over TVs. Just go through the settings on your TV and fiddle a little bit until it looks good to you. If you want to go a step further get the Avia (or comparable) calibration DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray which will help you adjust the TV for around $30. You can also recalibrate your TV as it gets older. I think it's funny that people will pay hundreds to get their TV calibrated when it's brand new and then they never calibrate it again. What's the point?

Eliott Spitzer says $100 for access to a secret panel is quite the bargain.

I hate it when managers say they'll "call you back". You can be sure they're thinking "I don't care".

Be aware that to calibrate an HDTV, you need more than a DVD and its 480p resolution. If you have an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, I presume there are 720p/1080i/1080p reference discs for those.

As for the "service panel," it's accessed by a code on the remote. Google your model and "service panel" and you can see how to get to it. Note, if you screw it up (which may be hard or easy depending on your tech savvy), you could brick your TV.

If you're going to pay money to calibrate your TV, hire a pro that will stand behind their work. AVSForum is a good place to find referrals.

The Circuit City Protection Package includes a DVD on how to calibrate your TV by yourself. Works Pretty well too.

@jaydez: whats txt certified? do you mea thx certified? because i have a bunch of those and it'd be cool if i could calibrate my tv with them

[spyder.datacolor.com] you can get this and do it your self when every you feel like it. It dose a good job I first came across it after I used the version for monitor calbration.

@digitalhen:

Good job blaming the consumer. And on the fourth comment in, it's getting earlier and earlier every post that the consumer is blamed for the shoddy service.

He ASKED them if they performed something that he was told about, he tried to verify that this was something he could not do himself. This wasn't an uninformed person. Good job doing the exact opposite of what this website is for. Congrats.

[spyder.datacolor.com] you can use this and calbrate your TV any time you want and they are not that expensive I paid $180 for mine and set it up in no time.

good thing circuit city requires their firedog technicians be certified in brightness/contrast calibration via remote control on a wide variety of LCD & plasma tv's. otherwise we'd be completely doomed

I hope he gets his money back, too. However, I've noticed a trend of OPs saying that they didn't "get around" to asking for a refund for a defective product/service until several weeks after it happened.

In my experience, stores take you more seriously when you follow up in a timely manner, instead of waiting around for several weeks. Last time I paid for something I thought I got ripped off for, I was on the phone 3 days in a row until I had it fixed (and I got a credit, to boot!). When someone waits 5 weeks to complain about something they knew was terrible the minute it happened, the manager/corporate probably won't take them as seriously anymore.

@kimsama: P.S. not blaming the consumer, just adding my two cents on how to get a better response to the complaint -- complain sooner rather than later, and don't depend on a poorly-qualified Firedog rep to log your complaint for you.

The headline is kind of misleading, as the technician didn't bother with any secret panels at all.

It's not about getting a good picture, it's about getting an accurate picture. ISF calibration measures the color accuracy accross a gamut of brightness levels and they have equipment that measures the accuracy.

The reason you want an accurate picture is to see what the director/movie studio intended you to see. They spend millions of dollars to create a look for their movies and it is a real shame that our sets can't display what they intended.

When my friends scoff at this, I ask them if they would change the color of a famous painting to go along with the decour of the room they intend to hang it in. They usually get it then.

If it wasn't broken, why fix it?

Wow a sucker is born every minute.

I'm suprised no one has mentioned this yet. What this guy was looking for is: ISF Calibration [www.isfcalibration.com]

These guys are well worth the money if you are a video purist and have a high tech HDTV.

If you just have the average run of the mill HDTV then ISF calibration is a little overboard.

Admittedly ISF calibration is more needed for DLP rear projection units and DLP front projection units. Plasma and LCD have far less customization from the "service menus" (hidden menus on the HDTV) than a DLP or even older 3gun HDTV's.

So what this guy was looking for DOES exist, just not from the idiots from Circuit City or Best Buy.

@arch05:

Not always.... the managers I work with *ALWAYS* call back the customers they have promised to do so. Work in retail for a bit - we're not all heartless jerks who are trying to all your money from you. Some of us just like helping people and playing with the stuff without having to pay for it (in-store I mean... I heartily oppose theft)

BB uses about $20,000 worth of equipment to calibrate at the correct temps and for viewing in bright and dark conditions. It does extend the life of the TV and makes your picture look much more natural and not as overwhelmingly bright. The techs get ISF certified before they're allowed to perform the services. It's $300.

@B: Yeah he does, and the "panel" he accessed probably wasn't worth a Franklin either. A couple cocktails maybe...

The service panel is not a physical location, rather it is an internal electronic setings, much like the BIOS in a computer motherboard.

The calibrations in the hidden service panel are coarse system wide, like changing the operating voltage of the appliance or changing the default values of user calibrations.

Most TVs do have a special code specifically for technicians to access menus that are not accessible otherwise.
If you have a high end projector, and hire an ISF technician, he is probably going to bring at least eight thousand dollars worth of equipment to do a proper calibration, and if he is ISF certified, he will make the picture look insane.
However, with a DVD like Video Essentials, and a trained eye, you can accomplish about 80 percent of what an ISF technician will, all this while not going through hidden menus. Of course some TVs don't give users as many options as others.

These hidden menus are not user friendly, and you can screw up the picture pretty bad if you don't know what you are doing. They let you adjust things like Gamma and many things that are much more complex than simple brightness and contrast.

Yah, a genuine calibration of any TV cannot be done just by looking at any old picture. Going off "flesh tones" and making them "look right" that way will screw with the image horribly. The best things a consumer can do for self-service is to get the Avia DVD and follow its instructions. That will get you a pretty darn good image. If you want something further, find a reputable home theater installer and have them take a look at the setup.

Usually the non-user settings are done through the remote, in a secret menu, not a panel. Plus, I've never heard of any special settings that his friends mention. (Note, I do not professionally calibrate TVs, but my father does.)

Also, I'd like to ask, what's the type of TV (plasma, LCD, DLP, LCoS, tube?) and what were the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, and (especially) sharpness settings the "tech" left it at?

@suburbancowboy:

I made the mistake of doing this on my CRT HDTV and boy, did it take me a long time to recalibrate the settings were that I messed up. I did have the service manual and all the service codes, but there was no way to just reset to the factory settings... Once you go into the service menu, you're asking for trouble. I went and got an AVIA DVD, which really helped get the picture back in shape. After fixing it, I never, ever touched the service menu again.

@Canadian Impostor:

People pay for the calibrations and the like to get accurate color representation, not to "make it look good to them."

In any high end setup, you are not looking for what abstractly looks good to one person, you want to make the picture and audio be as accurate to the original signal as possible, and to do that you need calibration, as the human eye, on it's own with a random image, is just too variable. Plus, most people don't understand what the settings are used for. I'll take the most misunderstood setting on a TV set, sharpness. This setting most people think that turning it up will make their image sharper. That's not exactly true, though. It is, in reality, an edge detection and enhancement filter, and adds artifacts to the image. It also reduces detail on the image. If you have it on, I'd suggest turning it off, wait a week of regular viewing, and see what the image is like before and after. You'll probably be happier with the setting off than up at all.

As far as those people who calibrate once and forget it, that's just apathy kicking in. I calibrate my sets myself with the Avia DVD every 6 months (DLP projection, if it were CRT/plasma/LCD direct-view, I'd go one year.) If you want accurate representation of the image, you need to have your rig calibrated, although, self-calibration is a very valid method, as long as you can understand the directions and reasoning the DVD is giving you.

yeah, I meant THX certified. I dont pay attemton when I type. Just look in the extras on the DVD.

Sounds kinda of like an OCD thing. Gotta have that picture just perfect, even though the thing looks kinda good already. I think that's the sort of thinking that let's BestBuy and the other places rip people off on the Monster Cables

@GenXCub: Haven't you heard? It's what all the cool kids are doing these days.

Seriously though, this whole "blame the consumer/poster" attitude around here lately is enough to make me skip the comments half the time.

@B: It's $100 to access the panel, but much much more if you want the gunk cleaned off of it first.

    I grew up in the era where you had knobs on the TV, and no remote. Moving the knobs and seeing what happened was fun. And now, even if you totally hose your TV or computer monitor/video card settings, there's usually handy "default settings" reset. They didn't have that in the 1960s.

    In fact, back in those days, if you really wanted to mess with somebody, you'd just reach into the knobs, and mess with the vertical hold, horizontal hold, and fine tuning knobs on their TV...

ISF calibration costs waaay more than $104.74 but, at least in my case, it was well worth it. However, not only should the person you hire to do it not be employed by Circuit City; they shouldn't even be the type of person to ever set foot in one.

In short, turn the brightness down, buddy.

This advice absolutely holds true for computer monitors as well. I just bought one over the weekend, and, after getting it set up, I found it to be blindingly bright. It is far more usable now, with the brightness turned down to around 30 (on a scale of 100). It was 90 out of the box. Similarly, my monitor at work is usually set to 50 (also on a scale of 100), but it is a few years older, which makes me wonder if we are seeing the visual equivalent to the loudness war.

Ambient light? Would that be ambient light in the morning, or the ambient light at 5:00 p.m. And is that 5:00 p.m. in the summer, or winter?

There are reasons to have calibration, but not by the Circuit City equivalent of Geek Squad. Contact the AVS forums for people who are really qualified with the proper test equipment.

Although, it's all so subjective anyway so I don't see the need regardless.

@SarcasticDwarf: "I always laugh a little at stories about tv calibration. Being mostly colorblind (is that like mostly harmless?) I always find it rather amusing."

Wouldn't you want the TV calibrated for somebody with your particular flavor of colorblindness?

@mewyn dyner: "Usually the non-user settings are done through the remote, in a secret menu, not a panel."

I assumed that "panel" meant "menu screen".

If you have the model number of your television, goto AVS Forums and search for it. The super geeks all post on that site, and almost always will post their settings for each TV. I swear by that site and it's totally free. There is a calibration DVD you can buy that comes will RGB cellophane that you hold up to your picture to optimize the colors.

I do love the AVS Forums site - just google it and then search the forum for your television model. It's full of other useful info about the television that you will enjoy. I know a big one is the "backlight" setting that matters a lot depending on the average lighting of the room...

Not only is blaming the consumer getting much too common, helpful comments are too few. "If it wasn't broken, why fix it?" is a rule of thumb that has validity that doesn't apply to situations like this. Calibration/fine tuning isn't the same as an all-or-nothing "broken" and many consumers of high tech or high cost items
want them to operate at the specifications or optimized settings that may very well have been the reason they selected a particular model or system. "Looks pretty good" isn't the same as looking the way it's supposed to, or as good as it can, which may well be quite impressive and a justification for making a purchase of a new piece of equipment. The cost of a service call seems high to me, but insuring that your investment is performing at its' best, and avoiding the time, doubts, and frustrations of doing numerous little tweaks they have a chance of making things unwatchable has an even higher price as far as satisfaction goes. If you wouldn't pay for a professional adjustment, say so - but don't imply that anyone who would is a sucker.

@kimsama: Its like when a customer comes in with an iPod 3 weeks later and claims it cam out of the box with a broken screen, usually they are full of shit.