Why on earth would anyone want to use this software when the manufacturer of tv usually has a good system relative to the tv? I surely trust Samsung on my Q90 65” over my 12 pro.
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Apple TV Color Balance Feature May Make Image Quality and Colors Worse
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I mean look, a properly and professionally calibrated display by a professional who does this for a living is always going to trump something automated. That said, how many folks here have EVER had their TV professionally calbrated? I've bought one of those DVD thingies back in the day, but for the most part I just manually tune it to my taste and then leave it. I've got a reasonable sense for what needs doing from researching the topic, but I'm no pro.
I used the new Apple calibration function on two TVs and it made a small difference, but nothing dramatic. I'm pleased with the result, there's no way I can tell if it is more accurate or not. I suspect that it's more accurate than I could have done.
I don't think Apple's goal here was to supplant the professionals. It was to provide an option that's likely good enough for 'most' people. Those who are particularly discerning will want the work done by a Pro.
I used the new Apple calibration function on two TVs and it made a small difference, but nothing dramatic. I'm pleased with the result, there's no way I can tell if it is more accurate or not. I suspect that it's more accurate than I could have done.
I don't think Apple's goal here was to supplant the professionals. It was to provide an option that's likely good enough for 'most' people. Those who are particularly discerning will want the work done by a Pro.
Would it?
i’m not so sure.
lets start with construction. The majority of TVs that people have in their homes are made of plastic. With Apple, that wouldn’t be the case. It’s Apple, they would want to make it out of fully recyclable aluminum and glass, and be as thin as possible. so add $500 for that.
next, there’s the panel. Now the majority of regular consumers would be fine with just a simple 1080P or 4K panel.
Not Apple.
they would most certainly want to include all of the technology from there XDR Display. Now the XDR display is 32 inches and 6K. I’ll just take a rough estimate, and say that Apple‘s television set, if it were to exist, would be about 64 inches and 8K or more. So that’s a $5,000 panel, plus the Apple tax, so let’s just bump it up to $6,000.
so with the panel, and the fully recyclable aluminum and glass construction, we’re already up to $6,500.
but we’re not done yet.
of course you would need a cool way to mount it. Apples not just gonna have you hang it on your wall like a regular TV, they want it to have a cool floating design. So… $1,999 mount.
We’re up to $8,499, rounded up to the nearest hundred, because of course you would know they would do that.
Now, we would need the processors to be able to both power this insane display, and power tvOS.
now Apple wouldn’t cheap out and include the A12, it probably wouldn’t even be able to power this entire thing.
We’re going with the M2, whatever it may be. Whatever the most powerful processor apple makes at the time that’s not in a Mac Pro is.
Let’s say, $1,000.
$200 for all The included cables and Power supply, $100 for tvOS, $100 for the special remote, rounded up to the nearest thousand…
oh and did I mention, of course this thing needs to have the best speakers. $1,000 for the speaker set up.
and I’m sure there will be other things that would cost a little extra money, so we’ll just bump it up to be safe.
we’re looking at a television set that costs upwards of $12,999.
now, do you think customers would be willing to spend that much money on a television? A television that most wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate, that costs way more than the majority of customers would be willing to spend on a television?
They weren’t willing to pay $350 for a home speaker, so I’m gonna go ahead and say no.
on top of all this, the majority of consumers only upgrade their TVs every… what... 8-10 years? Some even longer than that.
not saying that an Apple television wouldn’t be beautiful, because of course it would be. But would it sell a lot? I don’t think so.
If anything, Apple should be working on a cheaper version of the box. It’s already hard enough trying to sell a $200 box from Apple, when the competition is basically giving their streaming sticks away
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...I wonder if this would improve the picture on a not so new tv?
I have a 3-4 year old Samsung 4K/UHD 50" MU6120 tv - any thoughts if this would look better or worse?!!!
I have a 3-4 year old Samsung 4K/UHD 50" MU6120 tv - any thoughts if this would look better or worse?!!!
In amongst all this - we all see colors etc. slightly differently (thinking of the dress you could see in different colors depending) so custom to your own taste is going to be the way to go.
They gave up years ago. After Steve Jobs said “I’ve cracked it”, the idea never came to fruition. Apple had no chance at competing with display panel manufacturers, the market was already quite competitive and they actually had nothing special to separate from the others.
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My TV is rather old at this point and it's default settings were not very good in my opinion. I've dialed them in quite well over the years in my opinion so I was interested to see what this would do. It made a very slight change to be bit cooler. I did accept the suggestion. I can see how this could actually help a lot of folks get their colors a bit better. Perhaps though newer TVs are just much better calibrated from the factory.
Absolutely. His HDTVTest videos are a gold-mine of information about how TVs and display devices work, and he's completely without ego or pretense. I think that foundation is reflected in his analysis of this feature: He's not there to promote/bash anything. His goal is to provide a baseline of does this work, what are the results, and what is his professional evaluation of its value.
Anyone using this feature should balance his analysis against their own experimentation. Let it do its thing and decide for yourself if you believe it improves the picture of your TV or not. But don't pretend it is equivalent to professional calibration.
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What does this even mean?
From the article itself:
"When set to their most accurate out-of-the-box color presets, two of the three TVs Teoh tested had their color accuracy made worse. On a Samsung QLED TV, the overall color accuracy improved, but the image was incorrectly shifted to a cooler blue tone."
Not really a surprise - Apple's default profiles for all their laptops have been blue-shifted for years.
maybe because phone screen and tv screen serve different purposes and it will take a smarter system to consider all the aspects?
I can’t even get it to work no matter what distance and Color setting on the TV, always comes up failed.
The point is that it is flawed and on my RGB Edge-LED TV, the balanced image is worse, too, if i reset every setting of the TV to the factory settings and let the Apple TV do it’s “calibration”.
I get a far better result (almost perfect) when I manually calibrate it by hand with the Spears and Munsil UHD Disc and some additional test patterns, with a base picture setting that closely resembles D65 white point and Gamma 2.2/2.4.
So for the novice user, the point is that it should not make the picture worse, this cannot be Apple’s intention. They really need to go back and optimize it, since “good enough” would mean that it at least does give some benefit.
If they name it “Color Calibration”, then I would at least expect that colors are accurate, like on all new Apple devices (iPad Pro, iPhone etc.), but with no bad side-effects like Vincent demonstrated.
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As much as I love Vincent - he is looking at it from high scentific trained eye situation with a incentive not to do himself out of a job.
He put the TV's on their most accurate out of the box settings too - this isnt' really aimed at people who know what they're doing, what pay for calibration and already have settings pretty close.
This is for people who have no idea what is right or wrong and watch on the default vivid setting - it's going to get them a lot closer than not doing anything at all, but of course if you're taking something that is already 98% correct it's probably not going to be noticable.
He put the TV's on their most accurate out of the box settings too - this isnt' really aimed at people who know what they're doing, what pay for calibration and already have settings pretty close.
This is for people who have no idea what is right or wrong and watch on the default vivid setting - it's going to get them a lot closer than not doing anything at all, but of course if you're taking something that is already 98% correct it's probably not going to be noticable.
And there’s a reason people pay so much for professional calibration.
By the way let me be clear, it only makes sense to pay for professional calibration if you have a very high-end TV, like a Sony Master Series or LG OLED or something like that. It would be silly to use Color Balance on those TVs lol