HDTV Calibration Tips

While there are comprehensive instructions on how to use a TV calibration disc to properly adjust the picture quality on your television, here are three tips to help you get the most out of the calibration tools you’ll be using.

Lighting and the Home Theater

Whether you have a full-blown home theater or just a room where your HDTV resides, it’s important to know how bright or dim the lighting is, whether from a lamp or natural light, before you perform a video calibration.

You don’t want to spend time calibrating the brightness and contrast of your HDTV with all the lights on if you plan on spending most of your viewing time with the lights dimmed or even off. The same goes for the reverse:, don't calibrate in dim lighting if you’ll be watching TV with more light.

Natural light can really affect your image, particularly if your HDTV sits opposite a window, and especially if that window just happens to be facing the west. You can’t escape the kind of glare a setting sun produces while watching television, but a simple solution is to use curtains. Blinds work okay, but curtains tend to block light better.

Sharpness

The sales staff at your local store will likely turn the television’s sharpness up to the max (along with every other feature found in an HDTV), so the television looks as great as possible, especially under harsh store lighting.

While the default level of sharpness may not be quite as high, don’t be tempted to turn it up. Basically, the sharpness setting will add more definition to shapes on the television, so if it's set too high, a person in a movie may appear to have an outline.

We recommend keeping the sharpness level set to zero, particularly if you’re watching high definition programming. The image is pretty sharp and clear as is, and adding sharpness will give the picture an artificial feel. If you’re watching standard definition programming on a big screen HDTV and the image appears to be too soft, add a little bit of sharpness to it, just a couple of levels above zero.

The Hertz Factor

One of the big selling points of new HDTVs is the hertz (Hz) factor, which is how the television refreshes the image. Basically, the higher the Hz number, the smoother the resulting video will be. This a number that keeps increasing, due in part to technology improvements, but also due to HDTV manufacturers looking to improve the overall specs on a high definition television.

It’s a terrific and simple way for manufacturers to differentiate one HDTV as better than another, and therefore more expensive. Affordable HDTVs tend to have a 50 or 60 Hz refresh rate, and the video will only be as smooth as the way it was originally shot allows. Films and reality television are produced differently, with reality TV looking smoother than films.

As mentioned above, the higher a Hz refresh rate is, such as 120 or 240 Hz, the smoother the moving image becomes, which is terrific for sports, NASCAR and video games. However, when you look at movies or TV shows, the video is also smoothed out, and it tends to lose the “film” quality.

A movie can appear to have the smoothness of shows like local news broadcasts and reality TV, almost hyper-real, and perhaps unpleasant. You may think something is wrong with the image, but you can’t put your finger on it.

If you purchased an HDTV with a higher Hz refresh rate, the default is likely the higher rating; if you find your picture isn't quite right, it may be a good idea to go into the menu and bring it down to 60 Hz. This lower Hz refresh rate more accurately displays how the movie or TV show was originally shot.

When you're looking for an HDTV, if the only difference between two sets is the Hz refresh rate and a steeper price, don’t let the salesman push you into buying the HDTV with the higher Hz rate, because you may end up lowering it anyway.

Summary

These three tips are covered in some of the TV calibration discs we reviewed, but we feel it’s important to reiterate them here. You bought a great new HDTV and you want it to look its best, or maybe you want to make your existing television’s image look better. These tips will help you get a better calibration and overall image.

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