Glen,

Thank you ever so much for the link!!

I hooked up my old digital 8 sony and it works perfectly!!! I am a happy camper.

Now I can at least get better color from the TV until I can break down and get a broadcast monitor which is high on my list!!!!

I realize that a broadcast monitor is better than just a CRT TV for checking color and flicker during editing, but a good monitor isn't in the budget right now.

Is there a particular TV brand that anyone can recommend for this? something with more manual picture adjustments?

Vegas does, and I am grateful for that. However, I find that the biggest difference between my calibrated computer monitor and a television set is the gamma. Either that or PowerDVD is not doing its job properly. Simply put, images appear much darker on my computer. This makes any color correction very difficult.

I've tried loading different ICC profiles in Vegas and it doesn't do anything (whereas Photoshop does manage color). Perhaps I am missing something?!

I don't see how powerDVD comes into the equation, since it isn't Vegas and AFAIK it doesn't do color management.

However, powerDVD is affected by things like your video overlay settings, the MPEG2 decoder, etc.

Many consumer televisions are designed to be very bright... so that might be it. Or not.

The problem with many of the consumer TVs is that they have certain image cheats/tweaks that are difficult to get rid of.

Flesh tone correction makes a slice of color closer to flesh tone. If flesh tone is being decoded incorrect, flesh tone correction will make things right. However, this also makes adjacent colors close to flesh tone.
Some sets do allow you to disable this, without having to enter the service menu.

The other issue is that the color temperature in consumer CRTs is very blue-ish; this makes the image appear brighter (and presumably sells more TVs). At the higher color temp, the reds will look de-saturated... so TVs compensate this by oversaturating the reds.

One other thing TVs do is to decode the colors inaccurately. I'm not sure if this is a function of flesh tone correction or something else. It may be done to make the colors look better (i.e. to compensate for the phosphors having wacky colors, or the high color temp.). Regardless, this makes calibration to color bars impossible.

But at the very minimum, you can look for a TV which does:
Flesh tone correction on/off called auto color in some cases
brightness, contrast, saturation/color, hue
sharpness
color temperature

Some TV's, not all. Some of the JVC ones are surprisingly good and allow all of the extra gimmicky functions to be turned off.

So maybe JVC doesn't stand for junk video corporation??

That's interesting.

LOL.

My JVC 32" CRT television set can display a 1080 high def picture (and yes, it is a true high def picture, not downconverted to standard def), has a fantastic progressive scan deinterlacer for progressive footage, and the ability to totally turn off all artificial enhancements etc. There are absolutely zero scan line gaps too, so unlike virtually every other CRT I have ever seen the picture covers the whole screen without scanlines being visible. When I have set it up to bars and used a blue gel to set the colour I have found it was set up perfectly from the beginning. All in all quite impressive really. I bought the set 2 years ago for 500UKP!

Not that I use it for video editing though. But its nice to have.