

If you don’t have the original Spears & Munsil Benchmark disc which came with a blue filter, you can still purchase one online. One thing this release doesn’t come with is a blue filter for setting colour saturation, as, I’m told, this simple and effective method (devised by the BBC in the 1970s) doesn’t work efficiently with OLED TVs. A lot of the tests are intended for subjective evaluation others do require a colour probe and dedicated software to get the most from them. Seeing as a full Tektronix HDR test and evaluation system would cost you over £, it’s a small price to pay for a taste of how to assess playback, processors and displays.

A step-by-step approach is encouraged, beginning with basic setup (brightness, contrast, overscan, sharpness, etc, in the Video Setup menu), and moving through more advanced features and processing tests. The idea is that you fine-tune your display with the patterns to minimise problems in playback. There are setup patterns, evaluation patterns/charts, and montages of footage for further evaluation, all chosen to spotlight issues and failings in your playback system. The first thing that was made very clear to me is that it’s not a ‘test’ disc it’s an evaluation disc.Įxisting Spears & Munsil disc owners will be very familiar with the layout here. UHD HDR Benchmark, released this year, is a similar proposition, but for the 4K HDR era. And you might already own its previous High-Definition Benchmark Blu-ray, produced ten years ago, or even the DVD before that. If you are serious about your AV, you will have probably heard of Spears & Munsil, the company from pixel wizards Stacey Spears and Don Munsil.


*Sales items and some brands including Audio Pro, Pro-Ject, Kanto Audio and Audioengine are excluded from the discount code. Audio Affair will give you £20 off all orders over £250 when you use the code 7RW20.Push it to the limit and see where it technically falls over? Or, rather, just know how good your system is? Then this disc is for you. PEERS: DVS Ultra HD HDR10 Calibration DiscĭO YOU WANT to break your home cinema setup? System evaluation disc with 4K HDR (incl.
