Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The successor to the original Video Essentials was a long time coming. The new version suffers from the same flaws as the original: poor layout and access on the disc, very poor explanation in the narration, almost non-existant explanation in the liner notes, and consequently difficult-to-interpret test patterns. The narration is at times pompous and unduly technical--who is he trying to impress? I suppose that if you are already a set-up technician, none of the above matters, but I consider myself to know more about the technical side of audio and video than most consumers and had a very hard time making sense of even the basic adjustment instructions. Just a few for instances involving the basic test patterns for adjusting brightness, contrast, color, and hue: the narration is terribly unclear as to whether proper adjustment leaves the outermost black bars on the pluge-plus-bars pattern just barely visible or not. Then, after the narration tells you that the pluge pattern is not useful for adjusting non-CRT displays such as my plasma, it does not immediately follow the pluge with an appropriate pattern for adjusting non-CRT screens, referring the user to another chapter for discussion of that. When you get to that other chapter, the explanation of how to use the ramped gray scales is amazingingly ambiguous; for one thing, the reference to the 100% points is unclear because the ramps are not labeled. Then, on the new test pattern used on DVE to adjust color and hue, there is no explanation as to which of the bars and patches are to be adjusted for color and which for hue--again a lack of on-screen labeling or narrative explanation. ...