Professional Display Calibration

Can You Trust Your Display?

Whether you are a creative professional making important colour and exposure decisions, or simply someone who wants to enjoy films and other content as intended by their creative teams, you can‘t trust your display unless it has been verified by accurate test instruments.

We routinely calibrate the various production monitors in our rental fleet, and we have invested in quality test equipment to perform this task. We also offer a display calibration service to our customers.

Which Displays Can We Calibrate?

A broad range - SDR and HDR reference/mastering monitors, production monitors (client, on-camera, AC etc), PC and Mac computer displays, TVs used for client reference, home theatre, retail display, boardrooms etc.

So long as the display offers at least basic picture customisation controls like brightness, contrast and red/green/blue gain and bias adjustments then we can attempt a calibration to a target colour gamut and EOTF (e.g. for SDR it might be Rec. 709/BT.709 colour gamut with an EOTF of gamma 2.4).

Professional grade displays often support the use of a corrective 1D and/or 3D LUT to calibrate the display to a target colour gamut and EOTF. We can generate these corrective LUTs for you.

Common Display Calibration Targets
	Colour Gamut	EOTF	Peak Luminance (cd/m²)
SDR	Rec.709 / ITU-R BT.709 or DCI-P3	Gamma 2.4 or BT.1886	100
HDR (Dolby Vision / HDR10)	DCI-P3 or Rec.2020 (where supported)	PQ or HLG	>= 1,000 (display dependent)

What Test Equipment Do We Use?

There are various display technologies in production and coming to market, each with varying abilities to reproduce colour, black levels and peak luminance - think LCD with global LED backlights, OLED, mini-LED, micro-LED, a variety of quantum dot displays, etc.

Consequently, we follow display calibration best practice and use both a professional grade colorimeter (a Colorimetry Research CR-100) and spectroradiometer (a Colorimetry Research CR-250) in tandem in order to accurately profile whichever display technology is being used in the display to be calibrated.

A colorimeter on its own is insufficient to accurately verify or calibrate a display unless a precise correction matrix has been created with a spectroradiometer. For the utmost accuracy, we always profile the specific display being calibrated to account for manufacturing variation and display age.

Here we use a Colorimetry Research CR-100 colorimeter and CR-250 spectroradiometer in tandem to calibrate a SmallHD Cine 18 production monitor.

How Much Does It Cost?

A typical rate is $250 per display, but it depends on the specific display to be calibrated as some take a lot longer than others. It‘s best to contact us for a quote as we offer discounts for multiple displays and for regular customers.

How Long Does It Take?

It really depends on the display. Some are designed with efficient calibration in mind and others are not. If you are bringing your display to us for calibration, we typically arrange it so that it is with us for only one business day. Difficult displays might take longer.

If we are doing a site visit, we will discuss with you the number and type(s) of displays to be calibrated and arrange a schedule with you.