There are quite few calibration tools available, with the most common being DVD-based. Like our recent Monster/ISF HDTV Calibration Wizard review, The Ultimate DVD - Home Theater Fine Tuning Made Simple is targeted to the novice home theater enthusiast. With an average street price of $14.99, The Ultimate DVD does an adequate job of basic calibration of both video and audio. Menus are more cumbersome than necessary for such a basic tool and may frustrate novice users.

Read more for details.

When you buy an HDTV, it's usually configured from the factory to look best in the store. Therefore, in your home theater environment, your display may not look as good as it could. Calibration allows you to make adjustments to your video monitor so that you can achieve the best results.

The Ultimate DVD is a basic DVD calibration tool which includes audio and video calibration and a few nifty demonstrations. Priced reasonably at $19.99 (street is about $14.99), The Ultimate DVD provides a reasonable toolset. However, it is hampered by overly-nested menus and the lack of a basic guide or manual. This may frustrate novice users.

Calibrations

In order to understand how the tests work, each calibration test requires you to move to and click the test description button. While this may allow advanced users to blow through tests quicker, novices will find this tedious. When you click test description, you also get a demonstration of the test.

The following calibration tools are available.

Audio & Video Enhancement Tools

Video

• Brightness
  The brightness or black level test on The Ultimate DVD is easy enough to use and can provide reasonable results.
• Contrast
  The contract or white level test, works fine. While not as easy to get good results as the black level test, it still is effective.
• Geometry Test
  The geometry test does a nice job of showing the difference between 4:3, letterbox and anamorphic 16:9. Because you must manually adjust your aspect ratio in order to produce a truly round circle, it helps you understand when to do it and how a picture should look when you do it right. Unfortunately, The Ultimate DVD doesn't run you through all three automatically. Instead, you're required to choose one at the beginning and then go back to try the others. The reason I believe that's unfortunate is that novice users benefit from seeing an incorrect aspect ratio selection as much as they do from seeing a correct one. If you can't recognize it you can't correct it.
• 

  The Ultimate DVD - Nested Video Menu
  Color Adjustment
  Using flesh-tones, sky and flowers, you'll adjust the color levels and color tint. Given that color levels and tint can be tough to adjust, this does a reasonably good job for basic adjustments. More advanced Calibration tools like AVIA and Digital Video Essentials tools can provide better results than this test.
• Clamp Test
  While less of an adjustment and more of a benchmarking tool, the clamp test will demonstrate the monitor's ability to correctly maintain black level during high contrast transitions. This should have been included in the other demonstrations rather than in the Audio & Video Enhancement Tools section.
• Sharpness
  While The Ultimate DVD sharpness test does a decent job of helping you adjust the sharpness, novices may find it hard to know when they've got it adjusted properly. As your eye gets better trained at identifying common contrast levels, you'll improve your ability to sharpen. Don't over sharpen – it won't help.

The Ultimate DVD - Nested Audio Menu

For each of the audio formats (PCM Stereo, Dolby Stereo, Dolby Pro-logic, Dolby Digital (5.1) and DTS Surround (5.1)), the menus walk you through channel identification, polarity tests and level adjustment. The level adjustment will be difficult for novices, especially without a sound level meter. If you don't have a sound level meter, it will allow you to do a basic adjustment using your ear.

Remember, a decibel represents a noticeable change in sound level. While one decibel is a measurement most people can identify with their ears, most can't identify whether a change in sound is two, three or even five decibels. If you really want to get your audio configuration correct, I recommend getting a broad frequency (~ 35Hz to 8KHz) sound level meter. I personally like digital sound level meters with min/max capability like the Galaxy Audio CM140. However, lower cost units such as the Galaxy Audio CM130 will also do a reasonable job (but not for your subwoofer because it doesn't register the low frequencies). Alternatively, an analog sound level meter like this Parts Express unit will also work because it has both low and high frequency ranges.

The Ultimate DVD - Main Menu

Screen Formats
The Screen Formats menu lets you view the DVD in HDTML using a clever animation called Pipe Dream. Unfortunately, it really doesn't help you see the difference between a correctly vs. incorrectly configured screen – you don't get enough perspective to distinguish correct vs. incorrect aspect ratio. So other than being a cool animation with 5.1 audio, there's nothing here to help with correcting aspect ratio.

Multi-Angle
More of a demo than calibration. It lets you see several vehicles in a crash test from seven different angles. A cool demonstration of the angle button feature of DVDs. Funny thing is, it's likely the last time you'll use angle in your DVD viewing.

Multi-Lingual
With seven different audio language tracks, you can try switching between the different tracks. Additionally, you can turn on and off subtitles. Like the other demos, it's interesting but not terribly useful unless you are really new to DVDs.

Audio Options
Audio options lets you test out your DVD player and home theater receiver's ability to playback Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1. When you select these audio formats in a movie DVD, you get a similar demonstration. There are three different examples per format and they do a nice job of showing off the 5.1 capabilities. Again, while interesting, it's not especially helpful.

Pros

• Includes both video and audio calibration tools
• Novices can get reasonable results
• Price

Cons

• Cumbersome interface with nested menus
• Geeks advanced users may want to choose tools that can refine results a bit more, especially tint tools.

Summary

The Ultimate DVD - Home Theater Fine Tuning Made Simple provides ok results for all levels of users who want reasonably quick calibration. While there are tools that can tweak colors a bit more, it's questionable whether the novice users will leverage those tweaks. Given that THX Optimizer is available free on a number of movie DVDs, there is free competition. Many users comfortable with home theater will find using the THX Optimizer on movies like Cars or The Incredibles provides more than adequate results.

While the novice is the obvious target, a nested cumbersome interface makes it difficult to give a strong recommendation for The Ultimate DVD. So should you buy it? If you feel you can't get what you want from the free tools on THX disks and want a basic calibration with audio capability, this a decent tool. However, if you want more, you should look to other tools.

The Ultimate DVD - Home Theater Fine Tuning Made Simple

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