Tucked away amid the deluge of news Samsung dropped at the recent ‘virtual’ CES was a little nugget about something called EZCal that didn’t get much attention at the time - including, I must admit, from me. Having now had the chance to chat with the Samsung team behind EZCal, though, and having witnessed a demo (albeit only via live laptop video) of it in action, I really think it has the potential to be a genuine TV market game changer.
As its name kind of suggests, EZCal is all about making it easier to calibrate your television so that it delivers pictures that match established picture standards - and in doing so resemble as closely as possible the look filmmakers wanted you to see when they created their masterpieces in professional mastering suites.
At the moment, calibrating a TV in this way is a complicated and expensive process involving a raft of expensive equipment and software, as well as depths of know-how that will in the vast majority of cases require a TV owner to spend hundreds of dollars hiring the services of a qualified calibration engineer. EZCal, though, makes it possible for you to achieve automatically what appears to be a startlingly accurate calibration by yourself using nothing more than your smartphone.
EZCal's DIY calibration system promises to bring accurate pictures to the masses.
Here’s how it works. First, you need to install the EZCal app on a compatible Samsung Galaxy Phone, or Apple iPhone. Then you need to make sure that the mobile phone you’re using is on the same Wi-Fi network as the Samsung TV you’re wanting to calibrate.
At this point you will be presented with an onscreen display on the TV showing you where to hold your phone up to the screen.
Next, your TV and phone will analyse the ambient light conditions, before running optical measurements of your TV’s output using the smartphone’s camera. The EZCal software will then use the ambient light and image output information it’s gathered (having converted the RGB smartphone camera data to the XYZ coordinates the TV needs via a proprietary algorithm) to adjust the TV’s picture settings so that they hit the target values specified by the industry standards.
The EZCal software covers both HDR and SDR, and will allow you to input certain outcome criteria of your own if you wish - based on, for instance, the known luminance properties of your TV. It also, crucially, allows you to choose between three levels of calibration, depending on where you want to strike a balance between ease of use and accuracy of results.
EZCal gives you three different calibration options.
The Quick Mode takes less than 30 seconds to complete all of its measurements and TV adjustments. The exact time for each Quick Mode calibration will vary according to the capabilities of your phone and Samsung TV - though during the demo I saw, the Quick Mode process actually took only 15 seconds. This is pretty amazing when you consider that professional calibrators usually allow at least half a day for a full calibration visit.
The Quick Mode only works at the 2pt white balance level, so there are limits to its results. The Samsung representative I spoke with suggested that the Quick Mode delivers around 70% of the accuracy you might get with a full calibration. Obviously there was no way for me to confirm this via a laptop presentation - but even on the laptop feed it was easy to see how the ‘after’ EZCal Quick Mode calibration image looked noticeably closer to a professionally calibrated image sitting alongside it than it did before the 15-second calibration had been run.
If you want much more accurate results, the EZCal app provides a Basic Mode. This calibrates 20 points of white balance, and also analyses greyscale linearity and gamma. It takes a maximum of three minutes to run (again, it could be less depending on the capabilities of your phone and TV), but crucially Samsung claims it can deliver around 90% of the accuracy you would expect to achieve with a professional calibration.
In fact, Samsung claims that the results of the Basic Mode calibration achieve a Delta E 2000 value of less than one. Which means that the level of ‘error’ in the calibration process is below the threshold of human perception.
The EZCal system can take into account the lighting conditions of your room when making its ... [+]
If this isn’t enough for you, though, then EZCal also provides a Professional mode. This can take up to 15 minutes to complete, but covers white balance, greyscale linearity, gamma and chromaticity. Given the time this mode takes and the accuracy of the results, you need to darken your room for the process and, ideally, place your smartphone on a tripod. Samsung claims that the reward for your extra effort and time is a calibrated picture that achieves around 97-98% of the accuracy your might get with a full professional calibration.
I repeat that there was no way to verify these accuracy percentage claims during the ‘remote’ demo I was given. Also, because of how long it takes, I wasn’t shown a live run-through of the Professional mode. But part of calibration, of course, is being able to measure the results, so there doesn’t seem any reason to doubt Samsung’s claims.
In fact, Samsung stated that it is targeting a Delta E 2000 error of just 0.5 before it wraps up its development work on EZCal in February.
Samsung hasn’t yet finalized a list of the Samsung Galaxy and iPhone models EZCal will work with. The quality of the camera in any given phone is clearly critical to how effectively the system works, after all, and Samsung claims that this is why it currently only feels confident so far about recommending EZCal for recent Samsung and Apple phones.
The phone is, of course, just one half of the EZCal process. EZCal support also needs to be designed into a TV’s firmware. Full details of the TV side of things have yet to be ironed out, but the EZCal team did say that the expectation is that the EZCal-calibrated image would replace a Samsung TV’s out-of-the-box Movie mode setting.
It's not yet confirmed whether EZCal will be available on Samsung's 2021 Neo QLED TV range.
Currently, EZCal compatibility is only available on Samsung TVs featuring custom software builds. And since it has been created through an internal scheme for developing ideas suggested by Samsung staff, rather than originating inside Samsung’s core TV engineering department, formal discussions with Samsung’s TV division about using it will only begin in earnest in February when EZCal’s development process is complete. It’s therefore not clear yet whether EZCal might be added to Samsung’s 2021 range by a firmware update, or whether we’ll have to wait until 2022. In fact, it’s not yet definite that EZCal will appear on any TV at all.
Given the potential EZCal has in winning AV enthusiasts to Samsung’s premium TV cause, though, you’ve got to imagine that the brand’s TV engineers will look at finding a way to implement it sooner rather than later.
Don’t hold your breath about it being supported by other TV brands, though. The EZCal team very much see it as a potentially new feature for Samsung TVs, rather than a fully standalone system that might be licensed to other TV brands.
Given that Samsung TV picture presets typically prioritize spectacle over accuracy more than any other brand (and my personal love of TV hardware means that I don’t say that in a negative tone!), I was sceptical before seeing EZCal in action about whether it was really something that fitted in with Samsung’s wider TV philosophy. Now that I’ve seen how straightforward it is to use, though, and had at least a glimpse of the sort of results it can achieve, it seems to me that it really could be a significant feather in Samsung’s TV cap. After all, it both adds a crucial new picture outcome that would previously have cost hundreds of dollars to achieve, and forcefully makes the point that Samsung’s TVs are more than capable of delivering accurate pictures if that’s what you want from them.
Great news though EZCal might be for accuracy-loving TV consumers, the traditional calibration business will presumably be rather less pleased to see it. Personally, though, I don’t think it would necessarily mean instant devastation for calibrators and makers of high-end calibration equipment.
For starters, as noted previously, it’s currently expected that EZCal will only work with Samsung TVs, which would still leave a lot of other high-end TVs for calibrators to work on.
Some enthusiasts (and industry professionals) will also likely still want that extra 2-3% margin of precision a specialist calibrator and specialist calibration equipment may deliver - as well as the separate day and night modes associated with TVs that support the ISF calibration system. Samsung also says that it thinks EZCal could actually assist the calibration business by increasing general awareness of calibration among the TV-buying population.
In the end, though, Samsung’s concern with EZCal isn’t really the effect it might have on the professional calibration business. It’s partly focused, of course, on trying to sell more Samsung TVs. Having now seen how straightforwardly it works, though, it also seems to me that EZCal is a genuine attempt to democratize the calibration process to the point where literally anyone can do it. And I’m struggling to find anything not to like about that.
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