Spears & Munsil UHD HDR Benchmark (UHD Blu-ray Disc)

Is this is not for beginners. Takes a little bit of research to use it but it's worth it. My display has never looked more accurate and awesome! The best $40 I've ever spent. The demo videos are some of the highest quality 4K images I have ever seen. Amazing this couldn't recommend it more for serious enthusiast.

If you have ever calibrated a television in the past for proper black levels, contrast, color and so on, you know what this is for. This is the latest revision of the standard calibration disc, this time for UHD/HDR displays. After spending the money on a quality TV you may as well spend a little more to get the best out of the picture you can. As a layman like me you're not going to get a professionally calibrated picture using this yourself unless you have proper expensive measurement equipment, but you can get the display a lot closer to where it should be compared to the out of the box experience.

I consider myself a video and audio enthusiast and even I was initially overwhelmed with the amount of content on the disc. Most of the patterns are for professionals.As many reviewers state, the disc does not carry instructions on disc, nor does it come with a blue filter. However the Spears & Munsil disc insert says to visit their website for additional information. Once on the website, go to the "Articles" drop down menu and select "Ultra HD Edition Articles". From there you will see several articles giving instructions on how to use the disc. You can also go to the downloads section and download the "UHD HDR Benchmark, Beginners Guide V1.0", which is the official manual. I found the articles section had better instructions than the manual. Once I read the instructions in articles sections, I was off and calibrating my TV like a pro. I have a blue filter from another calibrating disc. However, the Spears & Munsil site doesn't recommend using a blue filter for HDR displays. The disc has patterns for those who still wish to use a blue filter.The instructions start out by stating you should set the color spectrum on your 4K Blu-ray player before calibrating. I had never even thought of that! The instructions say you should start with 4:4:4 and then work your way down to 4:2:0 and finish in RGB. It was extremely useful to have my player display in RGB. My TV's "game mode" never felt right even when I used other calibrating discs. That's because I ran those discs in 4:4:4 unknowingly and "game mode" is optimized for playing video games which usually display in RGB. This made a HUGE difference in the black levels of my games.The disc has all the standard tests for contrast, brightness, color, tint, sharpness, etc. It also has a ton of really advanved tests, such as to see if your TV is properly converting Rec. 709 or BT.2020. Once calibrated, my TV looked great.The demo material is 7 minutes long and it's transmitted in either SDR, HDR10, HDR10+, or Dolby Vision. It's even displayed in different brightness options of 400, 600, 1000, 4000, or 10,000 nits. The demo material is a great way to show off your fancy 4K HDR TV.Overall I give the disc 4 stars. It would receive 5 if instructions were on disc as that's way more convenient.

I purchased this disk to calibrate my 65 inch TV. I had the old 1080p version and used it a lot. This is no different in terms of a basic setup what you did on that is the same. This disk has a sdr and hdr setup procedure. I set up sd mode and then hdr mode. The picture is incredible on 4k. I watched maniac cop 2, punisher warzone and predator 2 all look great with exceptional color and deep inky blacks. Also the website has easy to understand guides. I highly recommend this to get the best picture out of your 4k TV.

TLDR, the reviews for this product were right on that this is not for the average home userI've dabbled in home theater for the last 15 years or so and am reasonably well versed in the basics without being an expert by any stretch of the imagination. I've done basic TV calibration lots of times before using resources like the Disney WOW disc. I recently built a new home with a dedicated theater room and mounted a 4K projector. I bought this disc thinking I was more educated than the basic user and between that knowledge and the instructions on the website, I could figure this out. And while I was able to do some basic stuff, at the end I didn't feel like my customized calibration was any better than the default(and admittedly very good) reference calibration that Sony provided.I'm still giving this 3 stars because this disc is chocked full of good and useful patterns and customizability. I will say that the documentation not being on the disc or in the package is kind of lame. The documentation is also a little more vague/ambiguous in place than I would like and not necessarily easy to find on their site. I'm now on the fence about sending this back and living with the reference calibration or going down the rabbit hole and buying calibration equipment and trying to figure out how to actually use this stuff. The latter would be more tempting if their documentation was a little more in depth and clear, which for this price I feel like it should be.