Most HDTVs look perfectly fine straight out of the box these days, without any sort of professional or DIY calibration. But if you want to crank up the quality just a little bit more, it’s much easier than you think.
Sound and Vision says it’s best to start by letting your set warm up for a half hour or so, and setting the lighting in your room to the levels you’ll typically use while parked on the couch. From there, all you’ll need is a Blu-ray player and a $US25 – $US30 calibration disc that’ll guide you through tinkering with your picture settings. Just don’t start messing around without instruction – you might end up making your image worse than it was before you touched it. With a little patience, you’ll end up with better colour reproduction, contrast, and brightness.
Sound and Vision’s full guide is easy to follow and worth a read – after dumping a grand or so into a new set, why not drop in a little extra investment to make ‘er shine? [Sound + Vision]
Photo by Karl Baron
edthecow
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 7:25 PMunless you’ve got a carefully controlled environment (e.g media room with no windows) then the settings you save in middle of the day will burn your retina at night. And your settings will also vary on the input you select, plus there are sometimes more settings to be made on some output devices (e.g. pc video card).
I’ve tweaked for days so I’m definitely all for calibration, just be aware there is unlikely to be a single magic setting.
Or maybe that is just a limitation of lcd, and super amoled will make such fooling around unnecessary?
BCK
Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 9:08 PMOR,
buy a VT series Panasonic and have multiple pictures settings that you can tune for that exact reason ;)