Calibrating Digital TVs

For a Just-So Picture, Today's Knob Twisters Call It Calibration

By ROY FURCHGOTT

On a typical day, Chris Baker, a senior technician at Crutchfield, the electronics retailer, takes five calls from angry customers who say their televisions are not delivering the picture they paid for. In most cases, they are right.

Take the customer with a new $1,500 26-inch Aquos high-definition television who called the company's headquarters in Charlottesville, Va., last month. "He was disappointed with how most everything looked," Mr. Baker said.

It turns out the customer's set had been hooked up to a standard-definition cable box, and with a low-grade cable at that. Mr. Baker gave him instructions on how to tune in a high-definition broadcast over the air. When a PBS show about polar bears appeared on the screen, "he had one of those 'Oh my God!' moments," Mr. Baker said.

For consumers puzzled about the lackluster picture on their new TV's, the problem is rarely a defect in the set. Many high-definition TV owners don't know they need a special cable box or satellite receiver to view HD programs.

"I have friends who say, 'Look at my display. Doesn't it look great?' And I say, 'It would look better in high definition,' " said Kevin Zarow, vice president for marketing and product development at Marantz, a maker of home entertainment equipment.

It's not just new HD sets that can have less-than-optimal images. Owners of standard sets often fail to make the few simple adjustments that can make their TV pictures more true.

Virtually every TV comes from the factory with the color levels set incorrectly. Sometimes the necessary cables are not included in the packing box. And sometimes additional equipment may be required. Still, most improvements can be made easily, often at little or no cost.

A picture may be poor because the set is hooked to the wrong kind of cable input. Although some TV's can get a signal through any of seven types of cables, only three of them - component, DVI and HDMI cables - carry high-definition signals. A common mistake is using an S-video cable from a conventional TV on an HD set.

The quality of the cable also matters. New gear often comes with cheap ones that can make the picture fuzzy or snowy. Cables should be heavy enough to carry an unrestricted signal, shielded from interference, and have sturdy plugs.

Adjusting the color is crucial because manufacturers usually set the colors to high brightness to grab attention in the store.

They adjust the set "so it will scream at you when you come in the door," said Joe Kane, a consultant to the television industry. "They make the gray scale blue, they make the light output as high as it will go, and they quite often use edge enhancement so that when you are far away it appears to have detail." Experts call this "torch mode," which may be effective on the salesroom floor but is painful for home viewing.

Most new TV's have options in the on-screen menu that can improve color fidelity. Dedicated settings like "sports," "cinema," or "vivid" alter color and brightness for specific viewing conditions.

Sports mode usually emphasizes greens, to make fields look spectacular. Vivid usually pumps up colors and brightness for watching in bright rooms. Movie or cinema mode is usually the closest to studio standards.

But even these settings do not necessarily produce the truest color. For that, you have to do the calibration yourself.

The simplest and least expensive way to calibrate a TV is to use the free THX Optimizer on any THX-certified DVD, like "The Incredibles" from Pixar. The DVD offers instructions on how to set color, tint, contrast and sharpness with on-screen tests.

"The procedures are basically the same we do on the master display monitor at the studio," said Rick Dean, vice president for technology development of THX, which has created certification standards for sound and picture in theaters and consumer electronic equipment. The optimizer works best with a $2 pair of blue-lens glasses available from the THX Web site (www.thx.com).

Sound & Vision magazine offers Home Theater Tune Up, a DVD with step-by-step instructions, tips and test patterns for adjusting the picture (www.soundandvisionmag.com, $21.95). But because it was produced in 2000, some of its advice might be outdated.

The Monster Cable I.S.F. HDTV Calibration Wizard (to be available this month at www.monstercable.com, $29.95) is even simpler to use. Instead of using test patterns, viewers watch video clips for adjustments. For instance, the viewer adjusts the black level until the lapel of a dark jacket onscreen is distinct from the dark shirt beneath it.

Another option, Joe Kane's Digital Video Essentials (www.videoessentials.com, $24.99), is up to date, but requires you to sit through lengthy explanations of how the tests work before you can use them.

The Avia Guide to Home Theater (www.ovationmultimedia.com, $49.99) has a great deal of information arranged in detailed menus so you can get an overview of a home theater setup, deeper information from submenus or skip right to the comprehensive collection of tests.

For the highest degree of picture accuracy, technicians certified by the Imaging Science Foundation use electronic color analyzers to adjust a TV to industry standards. The I.S.F. Web site, www.imagingscience.com, offers a list of technicians around the country who can perform this service.

Even after you have your TV calibrated properly, settings can drift over time, requiring readjustment. And sometimes a calibrated TV looks a little dull to viewers accustomed to torch mode. "Live with it a few weeks," Mr. Kane said, "then go back to what you used to watch. In most cases you'll say, 'Wow, this is awful.' "

The various devices that are hooked up to most TV's also affect picture quality. The cable box, DVD player, TiVo or digital video recorder - in addition to the TV - all have computer chips that process the video image on your screen.

The problem is these chips are not perfect, and each round of processing can add errors that diminish or distort the picture. The goal is to have the best-suited chip handle the processing, but how do you know which is best?

Only trial-and-error testing will tell. In most cases, the TV set has the best chips, but there are exceptions. To ferret out the superior chip you have to try various settings and connections.

For instance, you can connect a DVD player to your TV using a component cable. Component cables send an analog signal, which lets the TV do the bulk of the processing. Then for comparison, you can connect the same DVD player, set to progressive scan, using an HDMI or DVI cable, which transmits a digital signal largely processed by the player. Decide which connection gives you the better picture.

If it's too close to call, you can use the HQV Benchmark DVD from Silicon Optix (www.hqv.com/benchmark.cfm, $30), which has tests that reveal signal processing differences that may be subtle.

And if fine-tuning your set sounds too complicated, fear not. Even professionals like Scott Jordan, a home theater consultant with Electronics Design Group, say just about anyone can do it. "For the few hours it takes," Mr. Jordan said, "you'll have years of better TV."

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Are you Infected?

Who Has a Virus
By Neil J. Rubenking
We frequently hear from readers who are worried because their e-mail account has received numerous "mail rejected" notifications for messages that they never sent. One PC Magazine editor got over 300 such messages in one night! Readers are worried that this spate of rejections is caused by a virus. The good news is that this symptom generally doesn't indicate that you've got a virus. The bad news is that there's no way to block the flood of rejection messages. Here's what happens. Someone who has your e-mail address gets hit with an e-mail–based virus. The virus harvests all the e-mail addresses it can find from the victim's address book and possibly from e-mail messages and other documents. It then secretly sends itself to all these addresses, attempting to spread the infection further. Usually some of the harvested addresses will be invalid and hence will cause "mail rejected" messages. After a flood of such messages, the victim might be inspired to investigate or run a full virus scan. To protect itself from this eventuality, the virus "spoofs" the return address on the mail it sends out, using an address chosen randomly from its collection. The rejection messages go elsewhere, and the victim remains blissfully unaware. Unless you can determine just who among your contacts is the actual victim, there's nothing you can do to prevent the rejection messages. Nor can you automatically discard all rejection messages, since some of them may result from one of your own correspondents legitimately changing to a new e-mail address. But look on the bright side: At least your system isn't infected.

Guide to Redacting Word and PDF Documents

Click here to read the Guide

NSA issues guidance on redacting Word, PDF

By SHAUN WATERMAN
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 (UPI) -- The National Security Agency has issued technical guidance for U.S. officials on redacting or editing sensitive documents for release following a series of embarrassing incidents in which so-called metadata stored in electronic formats like Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF files has been accidentally exposed.

Both types of files are "complex, sophisticated computer data formats," reads the guidance document produced by the NSA's Information Assurance Division, which is responsible for the integrity of U.S. government computer networks.

The document, called "Redacting with confidence: How to safely publish sanitized reports converted from Word to PDF," says that these files can "contain many kinds of information, such as text, graphics, tables, images, (and) meta-data."

Metadata is information associated with the file, like a note of the author and the date the file was created.

This "complexity makes (documents in these and other formats) potential vehicles for exposing information unintentionally, especially when downgrading or sanitizing classified materials," the NSA concludes.

Although the document, dated December 2005 and posted on the Web site of the Federation of American Scientists last week, provides no concrete illustrations, there were at least two occasions last year when exactly such unintentional exposure of U.S. official documents took place.

Reporters checking the metadata for the 35-page "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" that President Bush unveiled last November found its author to be a National Security Council adviser named Peter Feaver.

Feaver is a Duke University political scientist who was recruited to join the White House staff in June 2005 after he and several colleagues presented the administration with an analysis of polls about the Iraq war.

Another kind of metadata is the so-called "undo stack," a list of every editing change made in the file, saved by the program so that they can be reversed using the "undo" function.

On April 30 last year, U.S.-led coalition forces in Baghdad posted on the Web a redacted version of their report into the shooting death of Italian special agent Nicola Calipari at a checkpoint on the city's notorious airport road.

Calipari was shot by U.S. troops when the car he was in approached the checkpoint. He was escorting freed Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who had been held hostage by Iraqi insurgents.

Military officials redacted key information about checkpoint procedures and events on the night in question from the report before posting it to the Web. But a few clicks of the mouse was all it took to restore the redacted parts.

"The key concept for understanding the issues that lead to the inadvertent exposure is that information hidden or covered in a computer document can almost always be recovered," says the NSA.

In the case of the Calipari report, the officers who prepared it apparently believed that when a document was converted to a PDF format, the "undo stack" disappeared.

"It was believed that once a document was converted to a PDF, it would not be able to be reversed [to] allow the information to be viewed," Army Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, who led the post-mortem into the accidental release told Government Computer News last year.

In actual fact, as the NSA document says, "numerous people have learned to their chagrin, merely converting a Microsoft Word document to PDF does not remove all metadata automatically."

Indeed, because there is software designed to make the two programs work together, the "undo stack" and all the file's other metadata is copied over into the new format.

The document goes on to say that Microsoft Word is "used throughout the (Department of Defense) and the Intelligence Community for preparing documents, reports, (and) notes," whereas "Adobe PDF is used very extensively by all parts of the U.S. Government and military services for disseminating and distributing documents ... over computer networks and the Internet ... PDF is often used as the format for downgraded or sanitized documents."

In other words, the kind of file conversion that was so disastrously misunderstood in the Calipari case is quite common.

Boylan told Government Computer News that in the future documents would be redacted physically and then scanned into PDFs so that inadvertent exposures of classified material would happen again.

But according to the NSA, that is not now necessary.

"The way to avoid exposure," the document says, "is to ensure that sensitive information is not just visually hidden or made illegible, but is actually removed from the original document."

The final version of the original document is then copied and pasted into a brand new document (thus purging the "undo stack" and other potentially sensitive metadata), and then finally converted into a PDF.

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