No one who considers themselves a home theater enthusiast should be without Video Essentials in the appropriate format, in this case on DVD. To illustrate how "essential" DVE is, I literally brought this disc with me to every store I went to (approaching a dozen) when auditioning big-screen HDTVs, tuning each one up on the spot before making an informed comparison. This invaluable tool has everything you need to get all your gear, whether $100 or $100,000, delivering its best results.

I had previously used a prior version of this that I borrowed from a friend to "optimize" my new LCD flatscreen TV. The explanations, guides and menus were very helpful. So I decided to purchase this new version, for my dad, to help him do the same with his TV. They made this latest version completely useless. Here are a list of pros and cons in no particular order.

Pros:
It's a DVD (DVD players are cheap)

Cons:
Forces you to watch the entire intro (for the DVD and at the beginning of every section) before you can even get to the menu (this was the most annoying). It does not allow you to fast forward through the "lecture" parts to get to the useful information (if you've done this before it gets quite boring very fast.
The menu was very poorly structured and difficult to navigate. Forces you to guess where certain parts may be, and most have "lecture" intros that you cannot back out of in case you're wrong(see prior complaint).
The all the "useful" parts (i.e. test screens and other calibration tutorials) for your TV were embedded somewhere within the lectures, which again made it difficult to navigate to (see first complaint).

Ultimately, I was so disgusted/frustrated with this product I sent it back to amazon, without actually using it to calibrate Dad's TV. Thankfully amazon has such a wonderful return policy that was the most rewarding part of this whole process (which is actually quite sad).

This is a very informative DVD for anyone with an interest in TV calibration and several hours available to spend watching and listening to it. However, if you just want to calibrate your TV, it is not so helpful and the disk IS NOT user friendly. It is very, very difficult to navigate through this DVD, even harder to find a specific item, and impossible to go back one section or chapter.

On the plus side, the instructions and graphic for adjusting Brightness are very good and should be useable by anyone in either the User Menu or Service Menu of a modern HDTV. The instructions and graphics for Contrast, not so much. Good information on the useless Sharpness control and adequate information and graphics to adjust Color saturation.

Bottom line, if you want a short course in digital video essentials and have time to spare, this is a nice DVD. If you have some understanding of TV calibration and just want to optimize the settings for your TV, then you will find this DVD very difficult to work with.

This one is dated; if you are new to Hi Def TV you will get some history lessons. However..

I got to the point where I was supposed to test red buy looking at bars on my TV thru the red plastic. I could NOT see what the audio told me I would see, and finally I gave up. Bad eyes? Bad description?

I have noticed that many of these fine-tuning video DVD's get poor reviews. Maybe this whole concept of describing video outcomes in print or in audio is a challenge beyond doing. I have joined the ranks of the disappointed.

I used the older Video Essentials with LaserDisc and DVD (separate media) and that original program has very detailed instructions on what to do and how to do it. I bought this newer DVD since it covers flat screens, which the older DVD didn't. Note, this doesn't cover an HD stuff, this is a SD video. This new program is lighter on the details of what to do and the history of NTSC (US version), but they still go into enough details on what to do and how to setup the screen. You do need to spend the time watching the somewhat dry material to learn what to do if you're new to this, but my dad figured it out and he's not very technical with TVs. If you already know what to do you can jump right to the test images... and they now include a 3 color filter vs, the original blue only filter.

They don't mention this anywhere, but you will probably want to purchase a sound level meter to set the audio levels for your surround system correctly if your system amplifier doesn't have it's own level monitoring microphone and test. I got my sound level meter from Radio Shack, the analog one, not the digital one... it's the same as they use in the video and is about $45 as of this writing (4/08).

I've used this DVD on all my TVs and monitors (yes computer monitors benefit from this too for games and movies!). My XBOX360 games look better and my new plasmas and LCDs are now set correctly. Out of the box, the Sharp Aquos 32" 1080p displays are way too oversaturated and contrasty, although the colors are ok (they still need minor adjustments). The Pioneer Kuro 42" was pretty good for contrast and colors, but I still lowered the brightness and made some minor adjustments to the colors. My older Pioneer HD1110-Pro was already set correctly since I had used the older Video Essentials with it, but it's a good idea to periodically check as brightness will fade over time for plasmas and LCDs (and CRTs for that matter!) I also found my Dell 24" widescreens were too bright and too "warm", I dialed in a lot of green and dialed back the red. If you plan to use this with your PC monitor(s), make sure you can adjust the individual colors (RGB) to make the most of it.

The other thing that you will want to be aware of is many monitors and TVs have a different settings (color/saturation/brightness/contrast) for each input, so depending on how you have your A/V system setup it might be a bit of work to correctly set everything... but it'll be worth it! I ended up copying the settings from one of the inputs to the cable box input on the TVs and have found color bars being broadcast occasionally to double check the settings.

For new TVs (plasmas and CRTs) you will want to hold off on adjusting the settings until you've used the display for at least 100 hours (but don't just leave the display turned on with a static image since it will "burn in" that image into the phosphors).