Most HDTVs ship with default settings that are meant to
look good in store showrooms, but more often than not, the default
presets don't take into account how the TV will look in your home, how
far away from it you'll sit, or what the normal lighting in your room
will be like when you fire up a new movie or watch the big game. The
result: A less-than-perfect picture from the device you spent hundreds
of dollars on and spend hours in front of. Thankfully, with the right
tools calibrating an HDTV to your viewing style is easy, and you can do
it in less than a half-hour.
Before You Get Started
All of the calibrations and settings we're going to work with here
are easily accessible on most HDTVs. We won't dive into the service menu
to make minute or precision changes just yet, and nothing we're about
to do here is any substitute for the work of a professional calibration
service. The goal here is to optimize the picture for your viewing
environment and your preferences, and save you from spending money on an
entry-level calibration service like Best Buy's when you could do the
same yourself.
What You'll Need:
- An LCD or Plasma HDTV that needs calibrating
- A Blu-Ray Player compatible with AVCHD,
or Advanced Video Coding High Definition, a file format and video
compression standard for high definition video. Most Blu-Ray players
already support it, butScroll to Blu-Ray Players List to double-check that yours is. Alternatively, an XBox 360 capable of full HD playback will do.
- The original remote controls for your DVD player and your HDTV (or a Logitech Harmony Remote,
which can emulate the buttons on the original remotes). Generic
universal remotes won't work because they're frequently missing buttons
or commands required to tweak your TV's setup menus.
- A calibration disc. The AVS HD 709 Calibration Disc
is the one we're using. It's free, easy to use, has all of the
calibration patterns we'll need, and can be downloaded and burned to a
DVD or Blu-ray Disc.
The AVS HD 709 isn't the only calibration disc available, there are others like the
Spears and Munsil calibration disc or
Digital Video Essentials
that have their own tutorials. We're sticking with the AVS HD 709
because it's free, can be downloaded and burned to a standard DVD or a
Blu-ray disc and played in just about any player (even in an HTPC or
Xbox 360), and its easy to get started with. Combined with this guide,
you'll get great results.
Step 1: Find Your Contrast, Brightness, and Other Basic Picture Settings
Before you do anything, the first thing to do is make yourself
familiar with your TV's controls and their current settings. If you
unboxed your television, put it on your entertainment center, turned it
on, and never looked back, now's the time to grab your remote, grab the
manual (or visit the manufacturer's web site to download a copy) and
take a look at the settings. You're going to need to know how to get to
the contrast, brightness, overscan (sometimes labeled "picture size" or
"HD size"), and other basic settings to calibrate your television.
If you've never spent quality time with the settings, it's also
possible you have your set dialed in to the "vivid" or "cinema" modes
that the manufacturer configured to make their set pop on store shelves.
That's fine if your TV is one among a wall of dozens, but it's horrible
for watching movies, sports, or Blu-ray discs. Once you've figured out
how to get into your TV's settings, the first thing you should do is set
everything back to their defaults, just in case. It's always better to
start from a clean slate.
Now drop the AVS HD 709 into your Blu-ray player (which may also need
to be set to its default video output settings, if you've changed them)
and let's get started.
Step 2: Eliminate Overscan for Full, Pixel-to-Pixel Viewing
The first and easiest change you can make to your TV to improve your viewing experience is to eliminate overscan.
Overscan
is the over-projection of an image beyond the borders of your HDTV or
display. It's a holdover from rear-projection and CRT televisions where
the actual image is blown up to actually be larger than the edges of the
screen so you wouldn't see any artifacts or compression errors on the
edges of the picture. With today's LCD and Plasma displays, all overscan
does rob you of a
1-to-1 pixel mapping
for your HD video, making your video look stretched out. Plus, overscan
eliminates the area around the edges of the screen, so you're missing
detail you may want to see. Here's how to fix it.
- After loading the AVD HD 709 calibration disc, start the "Basic Settings" program from the DVD menu.
- Forward to the 5th chapter to see the overscan and calibration image shown here.
- If you can see the entire image, including the outside white line,
overscan on your set is disabled. If all you see at the edges of your
screen are one of the blue borders, overscan is turned on, and it's time
to turn it off.
- Put the DVD remote down, pick up the TV remote, and go to your TV's
"picture size" or "screen size" settings. (On my Panasonic plasma, this
setting is buried under "HD size," so look around for any option you get
to select the size and shape of the display area.)
- Change the settings until you can see the white line on the outside.
There's almost always an option that disables overscan entirely.
With overscan disabled, you can rest knowing that you're actually
seeing everything that was intended to be seen on your Blu-ray discs or
HD programs, and none of the outside detail is being clipped away thanks
to an holdover from the days of old television sets. Plus, when you're
watching true HD programming in 1080p/i you'll know you're getting the
whole picture, pixel-for-pixel, as clear as possible.
Step 3: Tweak the Brightness forDeep, Dark Black Levels
Brightness
on a television, or "black level," on some sets, actually has little to
do with how much "pop" the screen has, and instead defines at what
level the darkest areas of the screen stop. In other words, it's the
setting where your TV stops reducing power to the pixels and says "okay,
that's dark enough to be black." Turn it up too high, and black areas
in your picture are washed out and grainy. Turn it down too low and you
lose all detail in dark areas of a scene, and everything looks like it
was shot in a basement.
Brightness should be configured when the TV is nice and warmed up and
the lighting in your living room or bedroom is set to its normal level
for when you watch television. This is important—the degree to which the
human eye can interpret detail in dark areas is directly related to the
amount of ambient light in the room, so make sure the lighting in the
room is normal for when you most often watch your television. Here's how
you configure brightness using the AVS HD 709 disc:
- From the DVD menu, select "Basic Settings" and start the first
chapter. You'll see the test pattern here. In motion, there are flashing
white bars behind each number, so don't be surprised.
- Line 16 is your "reference black," or the area that should always be
black, even though there are subtle white bars flashing behind the
others.
- Pick up your TV remote, and in the display settings, change the
brightness so line 16 is always black and you can no longer see the
flashing white bar behind it, but you can see the flashing white bar behind line 17.
- If you're properly dialed in for your room and your set, you should
barely be able to make out the flashing bars behind line 17 and up, and
the higher you go, the more obvious the flashing bars should be. Line 16
and below should remain black, no matter what. If you're borderline
between a little higher or a little darker, go darker.
Most televisions have the brightness set entirely too high by
default, so it's just a matter of bringing it down until it's configured
just right. Keep in mind though that if you're calibrating your TV in a
room that's brighter than usual, your ability to see dark detail will
be reduced. If you add a lamp to your living room or start watching more
movies with the lights on, you should come back here and tweak the
brightness again so you're not missing anything.
Step 4: Adjust the Contrast for Pure, Bright White
Contrast (not
Contrast Ratio,
which is not something you can change) represents the total light
output of the picture. Unfortunately, in order to make the image on the
screen "pop," most manufacturers turn the contrast entirely too high
before they ship their sets. Contrast settings define the overall light
output of the set, and this time your goal is to keep the light output
as high as possible without sacrificing image quality or detail. Here's
what to do:
- Again, select "Basic Settings." Fast forward to the third chapter.
You'll see the test pattern shown here. There should be subtle black
lines flashing behind each number.
- Pick up the TV remote. Adjust the contrast so you can clearly see the flashing bars behind lines 230-234.
- Line 235 is "reference white," or the limit above which there's
supposedly no additional detail in HD video, so if you can't see the
flashing bars beyond it, you're in good shape. If you can,
don't worry - that just means you'll get the detail if there is any, but
don't go crazy trying to get the contrast set so you can see it. You'll
know it's too high if the flashing bars start to take on a reddish
color—they should be grey at all times.
- Now that your contrast is dialed in, grab the DVD remote, and back up to the 2nd chapter. You'll see the test pattern below.
- This test pattern, with a white outer border and a black bar across
the horizontal center, lets you calibrate brightness and contrast
simultaneously. Changing contrast affects brightness, and vice versa, so
you want to make sure that after changing one, you haven't adversely
changed the other.
- On this test screen, you'll see flashing grey bars behind the white
numbers at the top, and flashing white bars behind the black bars in the
center. Again, reference white and reference black are noted.
- Make sure that anything below reference black is truly black and you
don't see flashing bars. Make sure anything above reference white is
either pure white and not flashing, or that the grey bars are faint and
grey without any color or hue. Make very fine adjustments here, nothing
big.
If you set the TV settings to the default like we suggested, your TV's "
color temperature"
should be set to its default, or "normal" setting. If not, make sure
you do this when you're tweaking the brightness and the contrast—it will
make sure that your whites are pure white and don't take on some a
blueish tone (if your color temperature is set to "cool") or a reddish
hue (if your color temperature is set to "warm"). If you're set to
normal and your whites are still too blue, go ahead and switch to the
warm color temperature. Ideally, you want your color temperature as
close as possible to 6500 Kelvin (6500K), or the reference temperature
used by directors and producers when they shoot and edit video. Often
this is accomplished by switching to the "warm" setting, but only do so
if it looks realistic—don't do it because you feel like you "have to."
Once you're finished here, your brightness and contrast are all dialed in. It's time to move on to sharpness.
Step 5: Adjust the Sharpness for a Clearer Picture
Sharpness creates the illusion of clearer, crisper images by
artificially inflating the peak white in your display. You're adding
information to the image you see on-screen, and by increasing the
sharpness you're trying to walk the line between making sure black lines
and borders aren't fuzzy and everything is as crisp as it can be
without making compression artifacts in your HD television streams or
Blu-ray discs really obvious on-screen. Some enthusiasts insist that
because turning up the sharpness introduces information to the picture
that was never intended to be there, you should set it to zero and move
on—I can respect that, but give it a try first and see if you like it
before you turn it off completely. Here's how you do it:
- From the DVD menu on the AVS HD 709, go back to "basic settings" and
forward to the fifth chapter—that's right, the same one we used for
overscan. (If you're curious why we didn't do this first, it's because
it's important to have brightness and contrast properly set before
working with sharpness.)
- The pattern in the center of the screen will be your guide here.
Grab the TV remote, and turn the sharpness all the way up. You should
notice that around the edges of the black lines you'll start to see a Moire Pattern,
or lines where there really shouldn't be any. They may look like a
curved line pattern, radially stretching across the black lines.
- That's your cue that the sharpness is up entirely too high. Back it
down from there until you can no longer see the radial patterns across
the black lines, but the black lines themselves stand out full and clear
from the white space between them. It'll be difficult, and it'll take a
good eye.
- Be careful not to turn the sharpness down too far (unless you hate
it anyway) because you may wind up softening the detail in the image and
the black lines will appear a little fuzzy. Experiment, and see what
makes you most comfortable.
Sharpness is a contentious feature. The only way to decide whether
you want to turn it off entirely or leave it on is to give it a try. The
important thing to do is to set it somewhere that enhances the viewing
experience for you. If you're having trouble, start in the center
instead of the extremes and work your way around the scale from there.
Step 6: Make Sure You're Not Bleeding Colors
Finally, it's time to check and make sure that you can clearly see
the difference between each color in a broad gradient, that you can
clearly see the difference between green and red, and the difference
between shades of green and red. To check, you'll need a color pattern
that steps through color gradients evenly. Thankfully, our calibration
disc has a pair of color patterns to help.
- At the DVD menu, select "Misc Patterns."
- Select "A - Additional," and forward to the third chapter. You should see the stepping pattern here.
- Look closely and make sure that you can see the steps between each
color, from brightest to darkest, and even to black, even if they're
subtle.
- If you can't make out the color stepping, there's no simple fix by
tweaking one setting, but you can try backing off of the brightness or
lowering the sharpness a little bit to make sure the colors aren't too
washed out.
- Once you're satisfied that you can see the color stepping, move forward to the next chapter to test for color clipping.
-
The pattern you'll see is similar to the contrast and brightness
patterns. Make sure you can see the flashing lines up to the Green, Red,
and Blue markers in each column (number 235) and afterward the colors
should be solid.
- Again, there's no quick fix if it's not configured properly, but tweaking the brightness or sharpness can help a bit.
If everything is set up correctly, these steps should just be to test
the colors after everything else is tweaked to be just the way you
like. You can adjust the tint to try and adjust clipping or bleeding,
but we'll get to that in a moment. Remember, every time you adjust
brightness or contrast, you should go back to the combined test pattern
to make sure they're aligned well, so don't change one without checking
the other afterward.
Extra Credit: Get a Blue Filter and Adjust the Tint
If you're up for some extra credit, adjusting the
Tint
on your HDTV will make sure that skin tones look realistic and
lifelike, and people with pale skin don't take on a green or reddish
tone, and people with dark skin don't look brownish-green.
The key to adjusting the tint properly is to get a blue filter or a pair of blue glasses first. Blue glasses are available from
THX for less than $2, and if you pick up the
Digital Video Essentials
calibration disc we mentioned earlier, it'll ship with one. If your
HDTV has a built-in "blue mode," that you can turn on and off in the
settings, use that instead! Using your set's built-in blue filter will
give you the best results, but fair warning, it's not common and only
some of the newest sets released in the past two years have them. Once
your blue filter is on-screen or in front of your eyes, here's how you
adjust the tint:
- From the "Basic Settings" program, skip forward to chapter 4, the
flashing color test. You should see the test pattern shown here, with
the small boxes inside the broad lines flashing periodically. Under blue
filter, those vertical lines should be blue and black.
- Adjust the tint up or down (most sets leave it in the middle by
default) until the flashing box inside the blue lines fades away
completely, and you can no longer see it flashing.
That's all there is to configuring tint. When you take off the blue
filter, you may not notice too much of a difference, but it'll be there
when you watch a Blu-ray disc when people's skin tones look more
natural. As always, you may need to go back and check brightness and
contrast to make sure those settings still look good to you now that
you've adjusted another setting.
Check Your Work: Watch a Blu-Ray Movie or Full-HD Video
Once you've finished adjusting your TV's settings, it's time to put
it to the test. Fire up your favorite Blu-ray movie or stream something
from the web (as long as it's full 1080p/i HD)—preferably something
colorful—and take a good look to make sure you're happy with the way
everything turned out. If you're not, tweak the individual settings or
repeat the process above to dial in your settings just right.
If you're looking for good films with vibrant color that you can use
to test your calibration, I recommend a movie that's translated well to
Blu-ray, like
The Fifth Element,
2001: A Space Odyssey,
or just about any Disney film. The point isn't to enjoy the film
(unless you like it, of course) but to test your tint settings to make
sure flesh tones look natural, contrast and brightness to make sure you
can see details in dark corners and spaces, overscan to make sure you're
not losing any of the picture off the sides of the screen, and color to
make sure bright colors don't glow unless they're supposed to, and
aren't washed out and dull.
You may need to watch a few movies, football games, and TV shows to
really make sure you're happy with the settings, so don't hesitate to
try something else, watch it, and change the settings some more even if
you've settled on something. The goal is to calibrate your TV to your
viewing environment and your eye. Don't be shy!
Graduate School: Get Into the Service Menu for More Precise Tweaks
Now that your TV is calibrated, you can trust that you're seeing the
Blu-ray movies and streaming video you own the way they were intended to
be viewed, and the best your HDTV can display given your living room.
However, HDTV calibration doesn't stop here. In fact, we've only
scratched the surface of what you could do.
Many professional HDTV calibration services will access your TV's
service menu using a special code or combination of button-presses on
the remote control or the side of the TV, and fine-tune the picture with
the more granular and precise controls available there. However,
there's a reason your owner's manual won't tell you how to get into the
service menu and what all of the options are—most manufacturers will
tell you that only certified and qualified professionals should work in
there, warn you that you'd void your warranty by doing so, and advise
you that mistakes and errors in the service menu can render your HDTV
inoperable. That's right—it can brick your HDTV.
That's no excuse to learn more. If you're interested in getting under
the hood to do some serious fine tuning and additional calibration, a
good place to start reading is the
AVS Forum.
Most manufacturers and HDTV models have a thread or sub-board there
that you can lurk in and read to learn as much as you can about your set
before you dive in. The community at the AVS Forum is helpful and
willing to answer informed questions. When you're ready to take the
plunge, you'll also likely find your service code and some calibration
settings to try posted by a fellow user who's been where you are with
the set you already own.
A few basic tweaks to your HDTV's picture settings will yield big
benefits the next time you sit down to watch the big game or fire up
your copy of
Planet Earth on Blu-ray, and they don't take much
time to make. Just make sure you keep your calibration disc handy in
case you want to refine your settings or calibrate another TV, and don't
be afraid to tinker with the settings if something doesn't look right.
After all, it's your viewing experience that matters.
Have you calibrated your HDTV? How did you set it up? Share your experiences in the comments below.
You can reach Alan Henry, the author of this post, at
alan@lifehacker.com, or better yet, follow him on
Twitter or
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