TVs this time of year are cheap, but I’m often disappointed after buying a new set. Image quality does not disappoint. Luckily, just a few tweaks will give you a better picture.
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Let’s say you got a bunch of fancy new TVs. Just plug it in and start watching your favorite TV shows and movies. But as soon as I start, I notice that the colors are off or too bright.
It’s not necessarily the TV’s fault. A new TV can be disappointing when you first bring it home. This is because it is not always correctly calibrated to the lighting in your home.
Even worse if you bought a store floor model. The floor model is heavily saturated and tinted, designed to stand out in fluorescent lighting. It looks terrible in standard home lighting.
You can pay a professional to set up your new TV, or you can save money and do it yourself with great results. Let’s start with the basic settings.
1. Use display presets
Your TV may have several built-in presets for different uses, such as watching movies or sports channels. These can be found in your TV’s picture settings menu. Refer to your TV’s manual to find them. If you don’t have the manual, tap or click here to find it online.
New TVs may have preset defaults like vivid Because it makes the colors pop the most — often too many. Many store models use this preset.
For general TV viewing, standard A preset, or whatever your TV calls it, is your best bet.
Try cycling through the other options and see which one you like best.You can also test the settings for different scenarios. Some TVs have presets for specific types of sports. So load a game or two and see how they work.
2. Use your eyes
If none of the presets suit your taste, try more control over your image settings. After all, you will be the one watching it. Settings you can adjust include contrast, hue, brightness, sharpness, and color temperature.
First, show some of your favorite movies in different scenes and lighting. Keep these tips in mind:
- When watching TV, set the lighting in the room to normal.
- Make sure your movie contains very dark scenes, very bright scenes, scenes full of people, and very colorful scenes.
- In dark scenes, adjust the brightness settings so that shadows are as black as possible and detail is visible.
- Then head to a bright scene and adjust by increasing the contrast. This makes the white space as white as possible without blowing out all the details.
- Then adjust the color temperature so that the skin tones and colors look natural. If your TV has a saturation control, you can fine tune the color saturation. There needs to be a sweet spot between ‘fading’ and ‘it hurts my eyes when I look at it’.
Once everything looks good, test the setting with a few more movies at different lighting levels in the room. I also have to turn off the TV a few times and come back a few minutes later to see the changes with a fresh eye.
If you don’t fully trust your own eyes or need a little more help, there are other steps you can take.
3. Use the calibration disc
For more accurate calibration, you can use a calibration disc. It walks you through each setting and provides carefully crafted visual images to guide you through fine-tuning. It works well most of the time, but don’t be afraid to change certain settings to your liking. It’s your TV, so the best pictures are the ones you like best.
There are several options for purchasing calibration discs. This Blu-ray is available from Spears & Muunsil for about $40..
Other calibration options
If you don’t want to buy discs, there are other options. First, check your TV manual, as it may have a built-in calibration routine.
Also, if you have a smart TV, there are some calibration videos you can load on YouTube. Search for “AVS HD 709” for those strings. Of course, they will do a little more work on your part.
If you want to get technical, Netflix has a calibration option. Log in to your Netflix account and netflix.com. click my list To add this video to your list, launch Netflix on your TV and in the list click Short example 23.976.
Start video and fast forward 9:40 minute markA color bar to indicate color saturation, a pattern of circles and boxes to ensure good aspect ratio and sharpness (circles should be perfectly round and boxes perfectly square), and gray A scale pattern appears. (Adjust the brightness and contrast so that all the boxes are clearly visible, but keep the blacks and whites as dark and light as possible.)
The grayscale test also tells you if the color temperature is off because there is a tint in the middle gray box.
After following any of the tips in this article, you should get better picture quality than you experienced on your TV. Now you can watch the big game in style.