Black Adjustable

8 Adjustments Guaranteed To Make Your HDTV Look Better

While the displays in the store look good, that’s not actually how the manufacturer meant for you to view them. The display sets come with high color saturation, sharpness, and brightness levels so that they stand out against the other 50 sets on the wall. In the home, that translates to a wildly colored, obnoxiously bright image. The fix for all of this is close at hand, however, and probably even free – calibration.

But first let’s talk about the settings you’ll need to consider, adjust, and why they’re important.

Room Lighting
The first thing to think about is room lighting. Your picture will always look better in a room with controlled lighting. With that being said, you don’t want to watch your TV in a pitch-black room either. After a while, you’ll experience eye strain and the picture will actually look worse. Instead, what you really want is to have some dim light directly behind the TV with the rest of the room being dark. You can get bulbs that are tuned to simulate daylight, and they’re perfect for this. Check your local hardware store for something in the 6500 Kelvin range. Lastly, make sure you don’t have any other lights in the room that will reflect in your screen, especially if you have a plasma TV. You’ll notice a decrease in picture quality as well.

Backlight
You’ll only have to be concerned with this if you have an LCD or LED TV. Essentially it’s the amount of light coming from your display. Your TV will have this set too high from the factory. That means decreasing this setting will improve your viewing experience. Be aware though that going too low will make your picture less vivid.

It’s pretty tough to get this one set correctly by eye, but you can get decently close with a dark room and a video with a lot of white in it. Try something with a lot of snow maybe. Watch the video for 10 or 15 minutes. Adjust the backlight until you don’t feel any eye strain or brightness levels that make you squint. The right level will actually be instinctive, so just adjust it until it feels “right.” I know that sounds odd, but it’s the truth.

Brightness
Brightness level determines how black your blacks are. Your TV manufacturer may also call it black level for that very reason. When this is set too high, it screws up your color balance and makes things look…weird. When it’s set too low though, you lose detail and dark areas all blend together.

Contrast
Contrast might also be called “Picture” on your TV. It affects the detail in brightly-colored areas in scenes and sets the overall luminance of the picture. Like Brightness, if this is set too high, your colors will be unbalanced. If it’s set too low though, your blacks look gray and things look muddy and flat.

Color
This is the big one. This sets the color saturation for your display. If you’ve ever watched anything on an old TV where everything red was fuzzy, you’ve seen the effects of color saturation that is set too high. High saturation will make colors look garish and unnatural. On the other hand, when you set Color too low the picture will be washed out and bland.

Tint
The Tint setting allows you to fine-tune your color balance by moving the entire color spectrum between green and magenta tints. Usually skin tones will show the greatest impact of this setting.

Sharpness
This setting artificially “sharpens” the image by making the edges of objects more pronounced. On a high-def TV, you’ll most likely set this to 0 as the image is already beautifully sharp and full of detail.

Color Temperature
The temperature is the overall color of the picture ranging from a blue to a red base. Setting it to warm or low will generally give you the best results for movies by increasing reds. Sports are often better with cool or blue overtones.

Aspect Ratio
Aspect ratio is basically the shape of your screen. Your HDTV will have a 16:9 ratio, or widescreen format. Your old CRT TV had a 4:3 ratio, or full screen format. I generally use both. Use the widescreen aspect ratio for movies; TV still uses full screen. If you leave your aspect ratio at widescreen while watching regular TV, people and objects look stretched out and wide. Setting your aspect ratio to 4:3 temporarily will fix that.

Now you understand the components of a great picture. If you’d like further help on actually calibrating an HDTV, check out my new site. I have an easy and free calibration how-to for you. Plus you’ll find tips on picking out the right TV, explanations of terms and sales jargon, equipment explanations and suggestions, and even a guide to putting together a free HTPC so you can browse your DVD, picture, and music collections…all from the comfort of your couch.

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