MXO2 and HDTV Pre-purchase - Can I trust the Calibration

[silentalibi]

Hi all!

I'm going to be grading my Red Epic short film soon (http://www.stillfallstherain.com), through 2k 10bit DPX sequences using Davinci Resolve on my Windows 7 machine. I've got an old Samsung SyncMaster 243T and a 23" Apple Cinema Display.

For this, I don't need 100% broadcast-accurate monitoring, just something that will get me ballpark results for DVD, mainly web, and probably festivals. There's no way I can currently afford a broadcast monitor.

Now here's the deal:

I've spent a fair while reading and searching, and it seemed like a good way to go about this for my needs and budget (under ?1000) was to get an MXO2 mini and a Panasonic Plasma HDTV, and use the Matrox calibration tool to get me somewhat close to broadcast-ish monitoring (or at least better than the terrible Spyder3 I own).

Assuming this was the case, I'd proceed in the unorthodox workflow of doing the grade in Resolve on my ACD monitor (since the MXO2 as far as I know doesn't work with Resolve), and then using MXO monitoring in After Effects, do the final adjustments/offset of colour until I was happy. Not ideal, but I'm the client and in theory it'd work, right?

The problem is, I've then come to realise that apparently, the newer Matrox HDMI calibration tool is now essentially useless and can't be trusted. The later forum posts I have read seemed to indicate that a fix was coming, but these posts were around 2011-ish, and I don't know if the issue has been resolved yet.

My questions:

- Does anyone know if the current Matrox calibration tool is reliable and works as advertised, so that my setup of MXO2 Mini + Samsung Plasma HDTV is near-ish to broadcast monitoring is valid?

- If not, could I use something like a BlackMagic Intensity Pro + HDTV, and if so, what would I need to do to ensure that the out-of-box HDTV was calibrated to a decent enough standard to grade my short film on?

Thank you all so much, sorry for the long post : )

Miguel
http://www.miguelsantana.net

[Matrox_Presales]

Hello Miguel and thank you for your interest in Matrox products. We have always been working on getting our users the best possible tools with our products. Here is the HDMI Color Calibration Utility Update : http://forum.matrox.com/mxo/viewtopic.php?t=7195

If you have a monitor that meets our requirements and does not scale or process the image you will enjoy the results.

regards,

JD
Customer Care