The Monster HDTV Calibration Wizard is an easy-to-use TV calibration DVD, with tools to adjust a television. It's from the company known for home theater cables and other accessories. But there’s a distinct lack of many tools, and this disc's WMV HD content isn’t going to accurately calibrate an HDTV. It lands in 10th place on our list.

The Monster HDTV Calibration Wizard is a relatively easy-to-use TV calibration disc. Two hosts – “Head Monster” Noel Lee and singer Jenna Drey – walk you through calibrating your television, plus there’s a music video from Drew that’s in WMV HD, 720p with 7.1 digital audio. While Noel is good, it's curious why Jenna was brought in to co-host this video, other than to show off her music video.

While the marketing for this disc promises to help you calibrate your HDTV, there are only extremely basic tools to do so, and most everything is in standard definition. We’ll take a closer look at the tools and video resolution below.

Monster promises that this is the easiest calibration disc to use because there aren’t any “complicated” test patterns. Okay, yes, they can be complicated when you first see them, but a good TV calibration disc walks you through how to use them. From there, the test patterns aid in accurately calibrating your TV. Without these test patterns, you may not get a completely accurate test pattern. We were happy with our image and sound, but when compared it to other discs with the test patterns, it wasn’t as good.

What is available on the DVD are a series of videos that more or less tell you what your brightness, contrast, color, sharpness and geometry settings are, but there is a complete lack of any sort of objective way of adjusting your TV. They’ll recommend how it should look, leaving it up to you to decide if it’s accurate or not.

That’s a very subjective way to calibrate your TV, and we’ll bet after the adjustments (and watching the music video to see how it looks), certain shows and movies won’t look as good, and you’ll want to re-adjust everything. We’d rather use test patterns with a blue filter (which the hosts call “geeky”) held up to your eyes; these methods are common simply because they are effective, giving you a much more accurate and objective calibration.

After giving it a spin, the standard definition television we tested this DVD on felt more or less calibrated, but we noticed movies and TV shows with dimmer lighting seemed a tad darker than normal. Bright lighting seemed fine, though. Overall, we weren’t completely sold on the calibration tools provided.

One other note: there aren’t any audio calibration tools, such as test signals like pink noise. Some of the other TV calibration discs we looked at have those, but we recommend checking out our home theater calibration disc reviews that cover Blu-ray discs and DVDs that can calibrate TVs and surround sound systems.

The Monster HDTV Calibration Wizard is best suited for standard definition (SD) TVs. Besides resolution, there are many other differences between HD and SD, including how color is processed, the aspect ratio (16 x 9 widescreen vs. 4 x 3 fullscreen) and more. You won’t get an accurate calibration using a standard definition DVD on an HDTV. So while they do feature “HDTV” in the title, we don’t recommend using this disc for adjusting your HDTV.

Yes, the music video featuring Ms. Drey is in high definition, billed as the “first music video” to be encoded using WMV HD (720p, 7.1 stereo). However, keep in mind that when this video was produced (2005), Blu-ray and even HD DVD wasn’t available yet. The only way to really see this video in HD is on a Blu-ray disc player that supports the format, or a Windows PC running at least XP.

As we mentioned above, there are on-screen tutorials and demos to help walk you through adjusting your television. If the disc fails, it will be replaced by the site you purchased it from, or from the manufacturer.