HQV Benchmark DVD
We
receive allot of email every week. Many of them ask us our opinions on
specific models. While we would love to spend every day watching and
evaluating HDTVs it is not possible to do so. Fortunately for all of
you a company called
Silicon Optix has created a DVD that will help you evaluate your TV or DVD player. The
HQV Benchmark DVD is designed to put your HDTV, monitor, video scaler or DVD Player through
a grueling video obstacle course, one that will reveal much about the
quality of video signal processing in these components.
The
DVD has a sequence of video clips and test patterns that will help you
objectively evaluate the effectiveness of your components in the areas
of de-interlacing, motion correction, noise reduction, film cadence detection,
and detail enhancement. The nice thing about this DVD is that there is
an introduction at the beginning that introduces a test and provides a
description what you should look for and how to score the test.
The test clips include:
- Color bars
- Two "jaggies" patterns
- A waving flag
- A static, detailed image
- A saturated color image to check for noise reduction
- A roller coaster sequence for motion adaptive noise reduction
- A test for film detail
- A series of tests for film and animation cadences
- A title crawl that mixes film and video elements.
To test your TV's ability to de-interlace and upconvert you'll need a DVD
player that can output a 480i signal. This way any de-interlacing and
scaling will only be done on your TV. Either analog or digital players
can be used in this test. To test your Up-converting DVD player's
ability to upconvert and de-interlace you'll need to make sure the
output is set to match the native resolution of your TV. This way the
TV will not do any scaling and you will be assured that you are
measuring the DVD performance. If you want to evaluate a scaler you'll
want to input a 480i signal to your scaler and have your scaler set to
the native resolution of the TV. The disc itself is a 480i disc. They
are working on a HD DVD and Blu Ray version that is scheduled for April
of this year. If you do not setup your system in this exact manner you
won't know which component is providing the good or bad processing.
Mixing and matching can be used to measure how your whole system
performs.
Now
the way you would use this DVD to help you evaluate a TV or
upconverting DVD player is to take it with you to the store and pop it
into a player and start grading the TV. The only problem we see with
this is finding a DVD player that will output a 480i signal in the
store. You can always bring your own but we recommend calling the store
to see if that's OK before you drag your player down with you. You can
buy the DVD for $30 but if you use the code smarthqv you can get $10
off (for a limited time).
