[Stuart Wright]

AV Podcast : Home Cinema : 30th May 2007
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00:42 AV News
06:55 Jason's bit
10:46 ISF training round table. Following our recent ISF training, the team talk with one of the instructors, Neil Davidson of T+W Marketing, about the course and our experiences of it.

[PioRow]

Very interesting podcast. Would of been nice if they could of gone into a bit more detail on the sets that they themselves calibrated. Also would of been interesting if they had talked about whether this course allowed them to go home and reclaibrate their own tv's to a higher standard.

I understand that ISF is a huge topic and they could of gone into huge detail, I just felt that this podcast was a tad short. I think the av podcast makes a concious effort to keep the podcast under an hour and very concise. I think they should take note of other podcasts the regularly go over an hour and try to extend the podcast.
What I think they should take on board is that the people who listen to these podcasts are seriously into their AV. If your trying to keep the podcast down to a manageable length so you dont scare off the casual AV enthusiast I think you dont need to worry. They arent listening!! My advice would be to extend these podcasts upto 2 hours so you can go into a bit more detail, this would appeal to me and I feel a lot of the listeners.

Back to this ISF calibration isssue. I may not be an expert on the matter but I think companies would ship tvs with some sort of ISF calibration. If they could setup a bog standard reference room that simulates the average UK front room then calibrate all tvs to this room. It wouldnt be perfect but it would be a hell of a lot better than the settings they ship at the moment.

[jwramsay]

No more Jason

[dbs2]

First Podcast i have listened to, while tiding up office, i will be making sure i don't miss any more... Thank You.... Very informative.....

[Phil Hinton]

Originally Posted by PioRow

Very interesting podcast. Would of been nice if they could of gone into a bit more detail on the sets that they themselves calibrated. Also would of been interesting if they had talked about whether this course allowed them to go home and reclaibrate their own tv's to a higher standard.

I understand that ISF is a huge topic and they could of gone into huge detail, I just felt that this podcast was a tad short. I think the av podcast makes a concious effort to keep the podcast under an hour and very concise. I think they should take note of other podcasts the regularly go over an hour and try to extend the podcast.
What I think they should take on board is that the people who listen to these podcasts are seriously into their AV. If your trying to keep the podcast down to a manageable length so you dont scare off the casual AV enthusiast I think you dont need to worry. They arent listening!! My advice would be to extend these podcasts upto 2 hours so you can go into a bit more detail, this would appeal to me and I feel a lot of the listeners.

Back to this ISF calibration isssue. I may not be an expert on the matter but I think companies would ship tvs with some sort of ISF calibration. If they could setup a bog standard reference room that simulates the average UK front room then calibrate all tvs to this room. It wouldnt be perfect but it would be a hell of a lot better than the settings they ship at the moment.

Thanks for your feedback, I hope I can answer some of your questions.
First of all the ISF training article. The long term reviewers and myself went on the course so we could calibrate our reference systems, so that the disc reviews on AVPlay could give authorative assessment of picture quality, with the knowledge that the reviewers system is accurate. Secondly, I have started reviewing equipment on a regular basis for the fourms, as part of these reviews calibration for both video and audio is important (and why I stayed an extra day for acoustics training). We have purchased the necessary software and equipment to allow us to calibrate each piece of equipment sent for review, and this will also allow us to do certain tests other magazines and websites don't dare mention. The results will be published within each review. On the course we calibrated a Runco projector, Pioneer 5000EX Plasma and two Fujistu 58 series plasmas. We used colourfacts Pro 7.0 and a gretag eye-one pro and spyder platinum colorimeter, and this is also the equipment we use for our reviews. All the reviewers and myself also opted to take the exam and on passing, will be ISF certified.
We touched on teh reasons why manufacturers don't calibrate sets they sell as it really is room and enviroment dependant. However you will also note we discussed a trial that Samsung are running in Germany where dealers will be trained to install the companies TVs, this is at least a step in the right direction.
Another reason for the team taking the course is to help educate forum members and the public that Calibration is important and hopefully promote good practice so that the industry may, if they listen to end users, introduce more of the features to allow better calibration of their products. Some other forum members have done some sterling work in this regard, like Chris Frost who recently held a Calibration evening for forum members to actually show them the benefits. Hopefully, because most enthusiasts have the same goals, we can bring people more of the information they need and at the same time question and challenge the major players in the industry to imporve standards. Again, we hope that by producing good quality equipment reviews which focus on what a display actually does as well as informative discussions within the podcast, we can at least attempt some of what I say above.

As to the level of knowledge that listeners have, well I would have to say that we will cater for as many people as possible with our podcasts. People are finding them useful as feedback suggests and are downloading them in large numbers, the last HC podcast had over 5,000 downloads.

With Jason leaving and the format going monthly, we will present things in a more enthusiast based way, with more detail on what equipment is coming, how to set things up correctly, help forum members with problems and get the industry involved in chats and interviews.

As to length, well we aim to cover the usual commute time of about an hour, however if there is plenty of material, we often do go over the hour long threshold and with a new format this is maybe likely more in the future as we try and squeeze more quality content in there.

I hope that answers some of your queries and thank you for taking the time to tell us what you think.

[recruit]

Another excellent podcast as usual Phil

[Renoir]

I think with the new monthly schedule a longer podcast (up to 2hrs) would be great and I'd agree with PioRow that most people listening would probably be happy with a longer show given the increased gap in between new shows. Either way I will continue to listen