About Us Stacey Spears and Don Munsil have written many seminal articles, together and separately, on inside secrets of video decoding, processing, and deinterlacing. They are inventors or co-inventors of multiple patents in video and image processing. Stacey Spears and Don Munsil, who created the highly-regarded DVD Player Benchmark™ and Progressive Scan Shootout at Secrets of Home Theater and High.

The Movie Itself: Our Reviewer's Take Home theater gearheads who frequent the boards are no doubt already familiar with the names Spears and Munsil. For the benefit of everyone else, Stacey Spears and Don Munsil are former writers for the web site who developed the DVD Benchmark and the Progressive Scan DVD Player Shootout.

In their time at Secrets, Munsil and Spears instituted a battery of tests that truly set the standard for how DVD hardware should be evaluated. Their invaluable reviews and articles explained the importance of deinterlacing performance in a thorough and accurate manner unmatched by any other publication, whether online or in print. Recently, the two men have brought their DVD experience into the Blu-ray realm by producing a new test disc called, simply enough, the 'Spears & Munsil High Definition Benchmark'.

A good calibration disc is the lynchpin of any home theater. At present, there aren't too many of them available on Blu-ray. Joe Kane's ' provides a host of test patterns for setting picture controls such as Brightness, Contrast, Sharpness, and Color. Meanwhile, the ' focuses on measurements for deinterlacing, scaling, and noise reduction.

The 'Spears & Munsil' disc attempts to combine the best attributes of both into one easy-to-use package. The disc starts with a 3-minute high-def video montage shot using a. It's mostly scenery and travelogue footage (with some time lapse) filmed in and around the Seattle area. 'Twin Peaks' fans will recognize the Snoqualmie Falls. After this begin the test patterns.

Users who have at least a modest familiarity with the basics of calibration will likely recognize the purpose for many of the test patterns on the disc. Nonetheless, most of the specific patterns provided were built by Spears and Munsil for the disc, and were optimized for HD displays. The menus are divided into three categories. 'Setup and Evaluation' offers static patterns for the likes of PLUGE, contrast, color bars, grayscale, picture geometry, and the. Norton Ghost V9.0. 'Source Adaptive Deinterlacing' contains film deinterlacing tests (specifically the famous 'Super Speedway' racetrack clip and a synthetic wedge) in a variety of cadences. 'Edge Adaptive Deinterlacing' is meant for video deinterlacing. Here you'll find patterns for jaggies, as well as mixed film and video content (scrolling horizontal and vertical text running at a different cadence than the video in the background), and some familiar public domain clips of bridges, hockey players, men climbing ropes, and a ship's mast.

Manual And Flexi-pro 8.6. The disc's menu structure is intuitive and easily navigated. Text instructions describing the purpose of each test and what to look for can be activated by simply pushing the UP arrow on your remote control. (Press DOWN to disable.) The disc was designed for home theater end users, not necessarily professional calibrators. The majority of tests were specifically chosen so as not to require any specialized equipment such as colorimeters or oscilloscopes. A blue filter (like that provided with 'Digital Video Essentials' and most DVD calibration discs) will be useful for the color bars, but unfortunately has not been provided.