Once you have got your new HDTV, you may find that the picture does not quite look how it did in the shop. People may look sunburnt or maybe there is little detail in darker areas of the scene. This is because most TVs will be supplied with factory settings and will almost certainly not have the optimum settings for your room.
Adjust HD Settings for Optimum Quality
Once you have your HDTV mounted, plugged in and connected up, it’s time to adjust the colour, brightness, contrast and other critical picture settings for the HDTV to perform at its best.
If you want to take the guesswork out of adjusting your TV’s settings and get excellent results, consider using calibration images which can be downloaded from the internet or purchasing a calibration DVD. These DVD’s include test patterns and scenes that make it easy to set your TV’s colour, contrast, brightness, etc.
However you don’t necessarily need these to get the best out of your picture. All you need is a number of scenes from a DVD or Blu-Ray disc, for example, which can help to optimise the screens brightness, contrast, colour and other critical settings.
Here’s a quick guide on how to get the best out of your HD screen.
Room Lighting
Room lighting is important. This is the first thing to sort out. Light from windows or lamps causes glare or reflection from the HDTV screen, resulting in a duller picture. Also, glare or reflections from the screen can be distracting. HDTV’s work best in specific lighting conditions.
For day light viewing, place your HDTV where the light from the windows will not shine directly onto the screen.
For night time viewing, placing a light behind your HDTV is a good idea as it provides lighting without interfering with the picture.
Viewing your TV in complete darkness is not recommended as it can strain your eyes.
Contrast
Contrast sets how intense the white levels are on screen and also controls the overall light output. If your contrast is set too high, images can become distorted and can also be harmful for your eyes.
To set your contrast you will need an image that contains a lot of white, but that also has some clear detail - a buttoned white shirt or arctic scene for example. Adjust the contrast to the highest setting and then decrease it until the detail is clear. Somewhere between 30% and 50% of the screen’s maximum contrast level is normally adequate.
Colour
Set the colour (or saturation) to suit your preferences. If it’s too low then images will look dull or even black and white, too high and they will look unrealistic with the reds in particular being accentuated too much.
To adjust the colour settings, find a close-up image of someone with light, soft skin.
Set the saturation to maximum – they’ll look sunburnt and very orange in colour. Then reduce it until the skin looks natural, realistic, without looking too red. Also make sure it doesn’t look dull and lifeless.
Your HDTV may have other settings, e.g. Tint, Hue and Colour Temperature, that may also need to be adjusted to achieve ideal colour setting for you.
Brightness
Brightness sets how dark the black sections of the screen are. If the brightness is too high then images can look 2-dimensional with poor colour saturation and if it’s set too low then the detail in shadows and dark areas will not be noticeable.
To optimise the brightness find an image with equal dark and light sections. Adjust the brightness to the highest setting and then decrease it until you can still notice the full detail in the dark areas.