Digital Home Thoughts: Surprise, Best Buy Calibration Service is a Crock

"A Consumerist tipster caught his local Best Buy running a display highlighting the difference between a calibrated and an un-calibrated HDTV. After further examination, the tipster noticed that the un-calibrated TV was hooked up with component cable while the calibrated TV had HDMI. As many of you know, component cable is output at analog, and some devices won't do 1080p without HDMI cables because of copy protection policies."

"At a demo for their $300 Geek Squad calibration service in an NC store, they have two identical HDTVs showing ESPN—one calibrated, which looks fantastic, and one that's supposedly not, which looks like total ass. That would be because it's showing standard def ESPN next to the "calibrated" set's ESPN HD."

Two separate incidents start to make me think this could be intentional rather than a fluke. But either way, this is bothersome. If the people that are supposed to be giving advice don't know the difference, that is bad. If they do know the difference are are intentionally trying to trick the customer, that is even worse. From the wider perspective, these are fairly obvious examples which point to how hard it is to comparison shop TVs. Given the above, I pretty much expect that when I go to any big box store and look at the wall of TVs that the ones with higher margins for the store, may very well have been given some extra TLC during setup and calibrated to best show off their value, whereas the cheaper models were at best just plugged in and at worst deliberately sabotaged. Any tips for the best way to comparison shop TVs short of bringing in your own calibration disk and spending hours recalibrating the displays?