So guess what?
Here I am in the car heading back home.
I was just visiting our office, CNET's office in New York.
In the back of the car, I have a whole bunch of televisions and I packed them in a bag because they're gonna be used for comparison when I'm building out this lab.
I also have all the lab equipment that I Need light meters, some source material, 4k blue ray player a bunch of stuff like that.
So the idea of course is to recreate as much as possible the testing lab that I have in the city.
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Of course you can see one of the problems here with my basement is that really doesn't have much room.
So it's got nice natural light, I'm actually going to put up some blackout shades over that to take care of that.
This wall here I figured I can put 265 inch TVs next to each other, far cry from the gigantic wall of six televisions that I normally use, going to try and play by the seat of our pants here, but the main object is to try and get.
It's close to a TV review that you guys are used to as possible.
See how it works out?
All right, it's the first TV stand of three that I'm gonna set up in here.
So you can imagine television set up, boom, right behind me in there.
I'm gonna sit right about here.
Try and compare them side by side just like I do in the TV lab.
So see how that works.
So one of the things that TV lab needs is light control.
So I'm here in my basement.
This actually has some pretty good windows for a basement as you can see here.
looking out the window I get pretty good natural lighting here.
That's a problem when you're measuring televisions.
So I'm gonna put up some blackout.
I've already put up one panel of it right here.
You can see it's not perfect around the edges.
I'm not gonna spend the time to get it exactly perfect.
But I'm gonna fill it in with tape here when I'm done.
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So all done with the window blackout, pretty happy the way it turned out, I used a little electrical tape there on the corners.
It's pretty much pitch black here, let me give you a taste.
Yeah, there's are my glasses, they are reflected in the phone, until how black that is.
Biggest thing is under the doorway there.
I'll just turn up the light in the next room.
But yeah, this is pretty good.
This is pretty much at least as dark as it gets in the TV lab at CNET, so that'll be really handy when I do some measurements.
The next step, I'm going to do some painting.
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Hey guys, so one of the projects for this TV lab is getting it looking good for photo and video.
So we're not just using this to test televisions.
I'm also using it to take photography and videos that I do, for TV for CNET.
So we got here is the back wall is gonna be my backdrop.
I'm gonna have a little piece of furniture down here and some plants, but the first step is painting.
So I got my kids here, Ella, and Max, you're going to be helping.
And we're gonna get this wall, a nice neutral color and put the TVs in front of it and see how it looks.
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Ella, you dripped all over the floor.
Hello.
That big device there is a light meter it's a Konica Minolta.
Light metre that called the spectral radiometer.
It's designed to measure colour light output black level, all the other characteristics of the television.
It's right there connected are aiming at the LG OLED TV that I'm going to review next.
And then we have my little seating area here.
That also shows the computer screen I'm going to be sitting right here that's a signal generator right next to that got the remote control for the LG OLED next to the computer.
The idea is just like MIT lab at CNET I'm going to be here in my basement.
Measuring all the characteristics of the display before I put it in a side by side comparison.
So of course, this setup does not show any of the other TVs I'm using in the comparison yet.
Those are still out in the car.
I just wanna give you guys an idea of what it would look like just to do the measurements.
Let me go ahead and turn off the light here.
See what it looks like.
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Get that a little bit darker.
Alexa, turn off the lamp.
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Alright, so that is what I'm going to be measuring in.
It's a pretty good measurement that's an initial measurement of of the TV itself.
You can't really see the numbers there maybe in the video but black level I measured completely black which is what you want from an OLED and this line right here is almost perfectly flat.
So that's your expense.
Expect the color temperature.
Not much work I'm gonna have to do to calibrate this thing.
But that's typical of the OLED displays that I get from LG.
So as you can see here, just finished the measurement that's a gray screen that my signal generator puts up there in between measurements, and it's going pretty well.
I'm pretty happy with the results.
I'm going to go ahead Do the calibration, do the HDR measurements, do some brightness test things like that and kind of round out my normal suite of testing here before I set up the comparison.
I'll show you that next.
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So as you can see, here's the complete setup I was able to get all 365 inch TVs into this This tiny basement.
This is the TCL, one of the best TVs I reviewed last year for an LCD.
This is the LG OLED and I'm reviewing next and a comparison LG.
So again, I brought these other two TVs in from the city and set them all up here.
It looks pretty good.
I'm gonna turn out the lights and engage with the blackout shades when I get a chance to sit down and really review these.
Course they have different stuff on now but I can put the same material on each of them if I want for really direct comparison, very similar what I have at the CNET lab in Manhattan course theory TVs here in the basement, but it's still pretty decent setup for comparison.
We'll see if the next TV review.
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