Direct-View and PTV Televisions

Jamie Wilson, the technician for Overture Audio/Video, showed up with a new calibration device made by Sencore for performing color-temperature calibration. This was a good move: out of the box, the Toshiba 34HDX82 presented an image far "hotter" than Jamie's older, Philips analyzer was capable of measuring. At the set's peak, the new analyzer measured color temperatures of 21,000 kelvins (not plotted here for obvious reasons), higher than he or I had ever seen—though that may have been because anything that hot is off the scale of the older analyzer. In any case, the Toshiba blazed visibly bluer than any I could recall.
Still, with relatively little effort, Wilson was able to bring the 34HDX82 under control to an almost perfect line of 6500K across the board—the NTSC standard (see the accompanying figure). Alignment was off in the corners of the screen, as often happens in particularly challenging sets with wide, flat screens. That was a small issue compared to the geometry problem: The edges of the screen were angled inward in a pronounced pincushion effect. This problem was easily and dramatically visible with grid test patterns, and occasionally visible with regular program material. I suspect the test sample was jarred in shipping. Still, any buyer should beware of this problem, and demand an exchange or repair of any new set that displays it.—JB