By David Katzmaier
The average American spends hours in front of the TV each week, but the picture on an average American TV looks like Times Square on steroids: too bright and garish to seem anything like real life. That's because default settings for TVs are configured to make an impact on the sales floor of your local electronics superstore, not necessarily in your living room. With the emergence of higher-quality wide-screen and high-definition TVs, not to mention the DVD movies and HD programs that fill their big screens, living-room images can look better than ever before--as long as you don't settle for the manufacturers' default settings.
Our guide includes three steps you can take to help make your television picture look its best. For starters, we'll tell you how to properly set the basic picture controls available on most TVs. Next, we'll take a look at various home-theater setup DVDs that provide expert advice for both video and audio fine-tuning. And lastly, we'll give you the lowdown on professional calibration and whether it's worth the investment for your high-end set.
HDTV tune-up tips: Basic | Intermediate | Advanced
Basic
You can do a lot to improve your picture using the simple adjustments found on all televisions. Taking the steps below will make the picture look more realistic and closer to what the director intended.
Room lighting
Since most people turn down the lights to watch a movie, our recommendations are designed to deliver a better DVD picture in rooms with controlled lighting. Unless you have a big-screen projector or you're sitting at the minimum viewing distance, you shouldn't watch movies in complete darkness--it can cause eyestrain. For bright plasmas and smaller direct-view sets, the ideal setup is to place a dim light directly behind the TV and leave the rest of the room dark. Look for special "daylight" bulbs that glow at 6,500 degrees Kelvin. You should also prevent any light in the room from reflecting off the TV, as glare will hamper image fidelity. Watching at night is best, but if you watch during the day, thick curtains will really improve the picture.
Before you make any of the adjustments detailed below, set room lighting as if you were about to watch a movie. For viewing in brighter environments, we recommend you use one of the picture presets, such as Standard, Sports, or Vivid, and reserve your custom settings for dark rooms.
Brightness
What it is: Also called black level, brightness actually adjusts how dark the black sections of the picture appear.
What it does: Excessive brightness can result in a two-dimensional, washed-out look with reduced color saturation. Images with brightness set too low lose detail in shadows, and distinctions between dark areas disappear in pools of black.
How to set it: After connecting your DVD player using the highest-quality input available, insert a DVD that has letterbox bars above and below the image, and find a scene that has a roughly equal amount of light and dark material. Turn up the control all the way, then decrease until the letterbox bars begin to appear black, as opposed to dark gray. If you notice a loss of shadow detail--for example, when people's eyes disappear into the depths under their brows--then you've set brightness too low. Some plasma, LCD, DLP, and LCoS TVs won't ever look black, so you'll need a setup disc to properly configure their brightness.
Contrast
What it is: Also called picture or white level, contrast controls the intensity of the white parts of the image and determines the overall light output of the display.
What it does: Contrast is usually set extremely high by default because it makes images look brighter in the store. High contrast can obscure details and distort lines in the image, cause eyestrain in dim rooms, and shorten the lifespan of tubes and plasma elements. Setting contrast too low robs the image of impact.
How to set it: Display a still image from DVD of a white object with some visible details--such as someone wearing a white button-up shirt or a shot of a glacier from the Ice Age DVD. Adjust the control up all the way, then reduce it until you can make out all the details in the white (such as buttons on a shirt or cracks in the ice). In general, TVs look best when contrast is set between 30 and 50 percent.
Color
What it is: Also called saturation, this control adjusts how intense the colors look.
What it does: When there's too much color, the set looks garish and unrealistic. It's most noticeable with reds, which are often accentuated (pushed) by the TV's color decoder. On the other hand, too little color diminishes the impact of the picture, making it look drab. Setting color to zero results in a black-and-white image.
How to set it: If available, first set the color-temperature control to the warmest option as described below. Then find an image of someone with light, delicate skin tones, preferably a close-up of a face, on a DVD. Turn up the color control until it looks like the person has sunburn, then reduce it until the skin looks natural, without too much red. If the rest of the colors look too drab, you can increase color slightly at the expense of accurate skin tones.
Other controls
Tint: Unless you're using one of the DVDs mentioned in the Intermediate section to set it properly, this control is best left at the midway point.
Sharpness: This adds artificial edges to objects, which sometimes helps with soft cable signals but almost always mars the already sharp image from a DVD. Reduce it to zero unless you detect visible softening along the edges of text; if you do, increase it until the edges appear sharp again.
Edge enhancement: Also called VSM or SVM for scan-velocity modulation, set this control to Off if possible.
Color temperature: This important control affects the entire palette of colors. Select the Warm or Low option, which should come closest to the NTSC standard of 6,500 degrees Kelvin.
Generally, the image looks best for DVD with picture "enhancements" such as autocolor, autoflesh tone, autocontrast, noise reduction, and other proprietary processing modes turned off. DVD image quality is good enough that these modes usually do more harm than good.
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