The disc is filled with test material and calibration patterns to help home theatre enthusiasts evaluate displays, players and home theatre systems to get the best possible picture.

Unlike similar test discs, the High Definition Benchmark uses patterns created from scratch. "We developed our own pattern software so we could make patterns for ourselves for evaluation and calibration. We didn't make our disc by encoding patterns from an off-the-shelf pattern generator," said co-creator Stacey Spears. "Everything was created and encoded entirely by us, with no compromises on quality."

The disc includes unique patterns and new twists on old favorites. A clipping pattern makes it easy to see whether the display is reproducing the highlights or shadows properly. The cropping pattern shows how much of the 1080p image is being cropped by the player and/or display. The chroma-channel evaluation patterns help evaluate chroma reproduction separately from luma.

"Our proprietary software generates the patterns in the native colour space of Blu-ray, without any unnecessary colour space conversions or rounding. That's the only way to minimize artefacts and preserve all of the detail and bandwidth," said co-creator Don Munsil. "Chroma patterns are especially tricky, because you can't create them properly with full dynamic range in the RGB space that most image-processing software uses."

"We're especially proud of our Chroma Alignment pattern," he added. "It allows you to quickly tell if the chroma channel is aligned properly with the luma channel. It's easy to see an offset of as little as a quarter-pixel, which we think is a first. It [also] allows you to check both vertical and horizontal alignment. In the old days of analogue, vertical chroma alignment was never a problem. But we've seen modern players that misalign the chroma channels up or down. Only our pattern can show you that kind of alignment issue, and show you whether it's a convergence problem or a decoding problem."

Classic patterns like the ubiquitous Colour Bars have also been given a fresh approach as well. "We noticed that lots of colour bar patterns have small artefacts at the borders between the bars," said Spears. "We shifted the borders between bars slightly so every one of them is on an AVC or VC-1 macroblock boundary. This ensures that there is no bleed or artefacting caused by compression."

Spears and Munsil are best known for their analysis and testing of deinterlacing chipsets, so it's no surprise that the disc includes a full suite of deinterlacing evaluation material. "When we started this project," said Spears, "we found that no existing software could create the special video-to-film pulldown patterns we wanted to generate. So we built our own pulldown generator. We built our own video editor and text overlay generator as well."

The Spears & Munsil High-Definition Benchmark, Blu-ray Edition is available from OPPO Digital, http://www.oppodigital.co m, and Amazon.com, http://www.amazon.com. List price is $24.99.