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How to Get the Best Picture From Your HDTV

by Terrence O'Brien on June 21, 2009 at 09:51 AM

How to Get the Best Picture Out of Your HDTV
If you're going to drop a few hundred (or thousand) dollars on a TV, you should get the best picture quality it can provide. Straight out of the box, the average television is set up for the show room floor -- color and brightness turned all the way up to grab attention. But your living room isn't lit up like a Best Buy (we hope), so you'll need to adjust the screen for your ultimate viewing pleasure.

The New York Times runs through exactly how to tweak your set. Here are the key steps:

Get the light right. Ideally, you should watch in a darkened room. But at the very least, arrange your space so that nothing (including sunlight) reflects directly off the screen.

Grab some patterns. Calibration test images (like the one above) help you see if the various picture settings are correct. While you can buy a calibration disc, save your money. Such images are provided on many movie DVDs (including most that bear the THX logo), and a quick Google search will turn up the same patterns. If your disc player or TV has a USB port, you can load the images using a thumb drive. Or you can plug a computer into your TV's HDMI port if your PC also has HDMI (or DVI, with an adapter cable).

Max the contrast ratio. The greater the bright-to-dark ratio, the sharper and more-detailed your video will appear. Using the test patterns, adjust the dark parts of the screen (oddly enough, using the 'brightness' control) so that blacks will be as deep as your screen can make them, without disappearing. Then turn up the 'contrast' control to make whites as bright as they can be, shy of washing out.

Get your hues in order. You may like a Marvel-Comics palette. And hey, who are we to judge? But if you don't want everything to look like a cartoon, use the 'color' and 'tint' controls to set the right tone. Test patterns will help you get your screen to match the colors on the monitors that editors use, so you'll see how the video's colors were intended to look.

With some test patterns and a little patience, you can transform your HD experience from kind-of-cool to jaw-dropping. [From: New York Times, via Lifehacker]

Tags: calibration, hdtv, television, thx, top

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