Optimizing and Fine Tuning your HDTV
Optimizing and Fine Tuning your HDTV
HDTV Basic Optimization
Understanding the basic functionality of your HDTV’s remote control can do a lot to optimize the viewing experience of your HDTV. Electrical showrooms display HDTV’s with a view to creating maximum impact. This often means for example that brightness levels are set to high for the average user, and can be to the detriment of the viewing experience in the home. The good news is that these type of setting can easily be optimized.
Room Lighting
Most of the time, lights are being turned off when we are about to watch a movie. The suggested recommendation for HDTV is to use controlled lighting to deliver a better HD picture. Unless you’re watching it through a projector or you’re sitting at a minimum viewing distance, you shouldn’t watch a movie in a complete darkness. This often result to 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.
- 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.
Brightness
What is Brightness? This is also called black level. This actually adjusts how dark the black section of the picture appears.
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 the brightness of HDTV?
Turn up the brightness to full, then reduce until just at the point 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 is Contrast? 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.
How to set the contrast of HDTV?
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 is color? 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 the color of HDTV?
If available 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.
