How to Calibrate Your TV

Whether you've just bought a new HDTV to furnish your living room with or you just want to improve your current TV viewing experience, calibration should be the first step you take. An incorrectly calibrated television will have a poor picture quality, resulting in a sub-par viewing experience. One option would be to hire a professional to calibrate for you, but that is a pricey investment. Instead, you can learn how to calibrate your TV quickly and effectively in a few simple steps.

Reset the television to factory settings.

 Factory settings are the settings for the TV when it has been purchased new. These settings are not the ones you want permanently as they are designed for the in-store setting with lots of bright, ambient light. However, you should reset to the factory settings so that you can use it as a foundation when calibrating the display for your own environment.

Disable any sort of dynamic display changing.

Some televisions are equipped with an ambient sensor which is used to automatically adjust the television color based on the environment. Unfortunately, dynamic modes tend to result in bright and garish pictures, so it's usually best to avoid using them.

Adjust the brightness levels.

The brightness setting isn't actually a control for brightness, but rather the level of blackness. Raising brightness is really just reducing the blackness. Adjust the brightness levels until your eyes feel comfortable watching the screen.

Adjust the contrast levels.

The contrast setting isn't actually a control for contrast, but rather the brightness of the white. Adjust the contrast levels until you can distinguish between dark blacks, light blacks, dark whites, and light whites.

Adjust the sharpness levels.

The sharpness setting adds information to the picture so that it looks more crisp. If your television is high definition, then you most likely do not need sharpness and can reduce it. If your television is not high definition, sharpness can help to improve picture quality.

Leave the Tint setting alone

Most televisions have their tint setting calibrated correctly straight out of the factory, so the factory setting for tint is likely the most optimal already.

• If your television has a feature that allows saving calibration profiles, then calibrate your television twice: once for day time and once for night time. Unless your television is in a room without windows, the brightness of the sunlight will affect your viewing experience. During the day, the television should use brighter settings. During the night, use darker setting
• If your television has a feature that allows saving calibration profiles, then calibrate your television for each input device. For example, the picture from your DVD player will differ from the picture out of your cable box so you should have different calibration settings for each. For optimal viewing, you may wish to calibrate your television for each source of picture.

• Calibrate your television at least once per year. Over time, the quality of your television lights and colors degrade, thus requiring a re-calibration on an annual basis.