Yesterday I had my 2 year old Samsung HPS5053 professionally calibrated by Gregg Loewen of Lion AV. WOW!!!! My plasma has almost 5000 hrs on it and it looks like he hung a brand new tv on my wall, well better than brand new because I have never seen picture detail like this anywhere. He was done around 5:30 and after he left I stayed up until 2am watching all of my favorites because it was like I was seeing them for the first time. No house is too far out of the way and no display is too far gone for him to work his magic on. The best part of it all is that it is like you are just hanging out with one of your good friends.He also explained everything he was doing to where one of my kids could understand. Great guy and awesome calibrator. I officially have the best looking display in Toney Alabama. Eight thumbs up from the Sipps family.

Gregg
Awesome is all I can say.
Been watching some Blu-Rays and its such an improvement.
The greatest thing is how great Football looks now – WOW – the difference is dramatic.
Have a safe and great Christmas!!
Dave

It only gets better. We were extremely pleased with its image quality after adjusting by eye for what I thought was proper skin tones, etc. and I couldn’t disagree with my wife that we might be crazy to have it professionally calibrated.

Earlier today Gregg Loewen of Lion Audio Video (lionav.com) unpacked and setup two travel cases of equipment and showed me that my settings were actually quite bad. He spent a couple of hours getting it well within THX calibration spec. While there were a couple of results that were not perfect, they were quite good, within THX spec and if better not anything that would be visible to the eye. Gregg’s comments included; “it had more calibration settings than most sets” and included the words “gorgeous” and “jealous”. You’ll have to check with Gregg for any comparison to other TV’s that he’s calibrated.

While the picture was great before calibration, it’s fabulous now. No question that colors are as they should be, whites are brighter, blacks are dead black (with room lights turned off blacks are totally black as with the TV turned OFF), etc. I don’t have another calibrated TV to compare it to, but as far as I am concerned, it’s perfect. Best of all, my wife says that she can easily see the improvement on both HD and SD programs and that it was worth getting it calibrated.

It’s too bad the TV’s can’t be properly calibrated as received from the manufacturer and the stores can’t have a level playing field with all display TV’s properly set up for an honest comparison.

My advice to anyone that spends the $ for a high end TV is that no matter how good you think it is, you’ll never know if it is as good as it can be without the services of someone with the equipment, knowledge and time to get it right. It’s also nice to no longer think that it could be better with additional tweaking by eye to correct for what might simply be poor quality program material.

Gregg:
As you know I am very demanding, and as you may tell by the audio and video equipment I own I want the best picture and audio I can afford, to enjoy  them to the fullest.  You have calibrated my plasmas before, but now that two of them are three years old I assumed it would be much more difficult to achieve a “good picture.”
The calibrations you did this week on my two plasmas that are three years old, up to the newest Kuros from Pioneer, produced outstanding results.  Not only are my new Pioneer Kuro and Elite plasmas depicting an outstanding picture, even my two older plasmas are showing an astonishing picture.    Even my wife noticed the difference, she asked me if I had replaced the master bedroom plasma with a new one.
Thanks for your help, you did an outstanding job in these calibrations. I think the results are truly unsurpassable.
Thanks again, and have safe travels and happy holidays.
Al