TV Calibration: HOW TO CALIBRATE YOUR TELEVISION'S PICTURE SETTINGS

    Why Calibrate?      You might expect manufacturers to ship televisions with the various controls already adjusted for optimal home viewing pleasure. They don't. Instead, TVs usually arrive with the brightness and contrast controls turned up as high as possible, which is almost never the ideal setting for your home. It does, however, show off the TV to maximum effect on the floor of big box retail stores which is the manufacturer's primary goal. Unfortunately, the ramped up brightness and contrast needed to stand out under the glaring fluorescent lights of the sales floor leave the picture looking washed out and lacking detail in typical home lighting. These settings can also harm your LCD TV over the long run, burning out the backlight years before its time. 

  Calibration Methods 

         There are four ways to calibrate your new LCD TV. In order of effectiveness, they are

• Hire a calibration expert with professional calibration equipment.
• Use a professional calibration DVD.
• Find a DVD in your collection that includes a THX Optimizer.
• Turn on the TV and adjust the settings using your eyesight

   Let's examine each of these methods in turn.

     Hire a Calibration Expert

Despite being by far the most effective way to ensure a truly optimal picture for your specific home lighting conditions, most viewers choose not to employ a professional. Why? Because it's not for the budget conscious. Hiring a professional to visit your home and fine-tune your LCD using their equipment will cost hundreds of dollars on top of the money you've already shelled out for the TV. But if you can afford it, hiring a professional is the best way to make sure your settings are calibrated to perfection.

  If you want professional quality calibration but don't have the money, you can search the Internet to see if reviewers or buyers of your model had it professionally calibrated and posted the settings, but this won't be the case for every model, or even most. And even when you can find settings posted, keep in mind that professionals calibrate the settings based on the exact lighting conditions in a specific room. The ideal settings for any given model will vary from location to location. For example, someone who loves to watch sports in the afternoon with the sun streaming in from the west will need very different settings than someone who mostly watches after dark, or with the lights off and the shades pulled tight.

     Use a Professional Calibration DVD

Of the various do-it-yourself methods, buying a professional calibration DVD offers you the greatest range of fine-tuning options and step-by-step instructions to guide you through the entire process. Two excellent choices for this purpose are Digital Video Essentials and The AVIA Guide to Home Theater. You don't have to buy one of these products to improve on the factory settings, but they will make adjusting your set easier and greatly increase the likelihood of achieving the most true-to-life, enjoyable-to-watch end results.

     Use the THX Optimizer

Want to adjust your settings without running to the store again? Just look in your collection for a DVD with the "THX Certified" logo. THX Certified DVDs are fairly common, and include a THX Optimizer feature. The THX Optimizer allows you to view a set of test patterns when adjusting your settings. This method allows for much more accurate calibration than simply watching whatever happens to be on the channel when you tune your LCD TV. Which brings us to the final, most common, but least effective option.

     Calibrate by Regular Eyesight

If you use this method, join the crowd. While you can and almost certainly will improve on the factory settings this way, you are not going to achieve the same level of accuracy and detail as you can by viewing a test pattern. If you decide to go this route anyhow, your best option is to use a family photo that accurately represents people you know. Don't use one that is off color, dim, or washed out, as that will defeat the purpose. Once you have the photo displayed on the screen, simply adjust the settings until the people in the photo look as close to real life as you can manage.

 Adjusting the Settings by Yourself

If you're going to hire a professional, no need to read further. You're done. And if you bought the DVD with step-by-step instructions, you should be reading those now. But if you're adjusting the picture on your own and without any other guide, here's the basic procedure to follow. We'll discuss the easiest settings to adjust first.

     Picture Enhancements

What are picture enhancements? The opposite of their name. The first thing you should do when adjusting your set is find out if your TV includes any features labeled "enhancement" or "correction," such as "edge enhancement" or "flesh tone correction." These features don't correct, enhance or improve anything. Fortunately, not all TVs have them, but disable these items if you find them on your screen menu.

     Mode

Adjusting this setting lets you achieve maximal gains for minimal effort. Most LCD TVs have a Mode feature. You will almost always get the most accurate picture from Movie or Cinema mode (the names of these modes, as with the controls, vary somewhat but it's usually possible to tell what is what). Should neither of these be available, choose "Normal." At all costs, avoid using Sports, Dynamic or Vivid mode. All this setting will accomplish, whatever its label, is to distort the colors into something glaringly unrealistic.

     Backlight Settings

Your backlight probably comes turned up to maximum power, which is too bright for most people's eyes and shortens the lifespan of your LCD TV. If your TV has a separate backlight setting, one of the easiest and most important things you can do to improve picture quality and enhance the life of your TV is set your backlight control to Normal. If you are in a dimly lit room, you might even want to try the Low or PowerSaver option.

Now we get to the potentially more complex adjustments.

     Color Temperature

Described in the simplest terms possible, if you have a Color Temperature control, it affects the tint given to white images, which in turn affects the color balance of your entire picture. Generally, Warm or Normal will be your best bet, but if your TV has a 6500 or 6500K setting, use that, because it is the ideal color temperature calibration. A more complicated method (which you can ignore if your TV possesses one of the 6500 settings) is to find an "80% White" test image, and check all the settings to see which one results in the most neutral gray.

     Black Level / Brightness

When you hear a TV brand trumpeting their improved Contrast Ratio, it's because this ratio--the difference between the blackest blacks and the whitest whites--is one of the most important aspects of a realistic picture. You calibrate the Black Level, one half of that contrast equation, with the Brightness control of your TV.

Lower your TV's Brightness control until a black area of the screen--such as the black bars on a test pattern or the dropshadow of the THX logo on the THX Optimizer--disappears from view. Then slowly turn up the Brightness until the black item is clearly visible again. This step ensures that everything intended to be black on your screen will be black, while enabling you to see all the details in dark or shadowy scenes.

     White level / Contrast

The other half of the contrast ratio, the white level, is usually controlled by the Contrast or Picture setting on your LCD TV. Adjust the white level by using a test pattern that features a pure white area next to a gray or off white section of the screen. Raise the Contrast control until the off white area disappears into the pure white. Then slowly lower the contrast until you can distinguish the two areas again. Then look at where the true white area borders the black background. Continue making careful adjustments until there's a sharp line between the black and white, with no blurry or smeared edges.

A Note on Brightness and Contrast

You will sometimes find that adjusting the White level (Contrast) affects the Black Level (Brightness). For this reason, you should double check your Brightness test pattern after adjusting your Contrast, and maybe switch back and forth between them after you've completed the adjustment to make sure you have the settings you want.

      Sharpness

Sharpness doesn't increase or decrease the physical resolution of your television, but it does make transitions between colors and shades appear sharper to the eye. This does not, however, mean "sharper is always better," because adjusting sharpness too high can cause eyestrain and introduce artifacts--ghosts and halos--into the picture. These artifacts surface most clearly between black and white colors, but may be seen between any different colors. When adjusting for sharpness, try to get the strongest possible lines and text in your test pattern image without the appearance of false edges or halos. You will actually be able to see more detail, not less, with your sharpness turned down to this level.

     Color

Color and tint are the aspects of calibration where professional equipment can make the greatest difference. In acknowledgement of this fact, both of the calibration DVDs listed above come packaged with different colored plastic films to aid in adjusting these settings, and TXH offers a set of blue lensed glasses you can order through the THX website.

In essence, if color is adjusted to the ideal setting, your screen displays the exact color information sent to it by the signal. Unfortunately, your TV probably comes from the factory set to artificially boost the color levels for a more eye-catching appearance on the sales floor. Make sure your mode setting is adjusted before you attempt to modify Color or Tint.

The best way to adjust Color is to hold the blue-tinted THX filter in front of your eyes while viewing a test pattern and adjust the color control on your TV until the appropriate boxes match. If you don't have a blue TXH filter, use your best judgement as to color accuracy.

    Tint

Color tint, also known as Hue on some TVs, controls the balance of red, green, and blue in your screen display. As with color, you are best served with professional equipment. If you don't have access to this, simply adjust the tint until the colors look right to you. As with brightness and contrast, color and tint interact in such a way that you may want to go back and forth between the two a couple of times for the most pleasing result.

  The Ultimate Test

When you think you've finished calibrating your TV, it's time to watch a favorite DVD to see if you like what you've done. This part of the calibration process is especially important with regard to tint and color, since personal preferences will vary a great deal in these settings, and adjustment with the naked eye is to a great degree intuitive. If you pop in your favorite movie or TV show and love what you see, your calibration process is now complete.