The most accurate, closest to the director’s intent, mode is usually labeled either Movie or Cinema (or THX, if you’ve got that). If you want to see their creations as close to how they intended as possible, read on. TV and movie directors shoot their TV shows and movies to look a certain way. For $30 from Amazon, it’s a disc that I can’t imagine not having, and that will let you coax the best performance out of your system.Here’s the thing. I discuss this a bit more over at HD Guru, and I go into really great depth at Secrets of Home Theater, which is linked below.

Spears & Munsil has been a reference disc of mine since I first got a copy and the new version continues that trend. Or you can go more in depth and learn everything you wanted to about your system if the interest strikes. You can only use the first two sections and get your display and receiver setup correctly and enjoy it from there. The best part of Spears & Munsil is that they have something for everyone on the disc. You can test for 3D crosstalk, for motion resolution, for video processing and scaling, and for many more advanced features that most people don’t care about, but as a reviewer I love to see. Anyone can offer a disc to setup brightness and contrast, but no one else offers a disc with these advanced patterns. The real meat of the disc is in the advanced patterns. They have also added more audio features, with test tones for level and phase, as well as audio delay. And boy, have they added a lot of content here.Īll of the basic setup patterns are back, only this time you also get 3D versions of them to calibrate with the glasses on, and you have more color and tint patterns to make sure you get those settings right. Now they are back with an update to Spears & Munsil, descriptively called Spears & Munsil, HD Benchmark Version 2. From the earliest days of progressive scan, to the chroma upsampling error, their work there helped to destroy the idea that “bits-are-bits” when it comes to digital video and show that players do have noticeable differences, and ones that we can test for.įor others, you might have been introduced to them by their Spears & Munsil HD Benchmark Blu-ray disc, which shipped with Oppo Blu-ray players and gave you access to a wide variety of test patterns to setup your video system, and well as test various aspects of its performance.

Spears & Munsil HD Benchmark Version 2 By Chris Heinonen on May 8, 2013įor many people, their first introduction to Stacey Spears and Don Munsil was from the Secrets of Home Theater DVD Benchmark, which they created to test DVD players to help distinguish the good from the bad.

Spears and munsil hd setup