When you bought your TV, it was set up to stand out on some wall in a huge, overly-lit warehouse in the midst of a hundred other competitors’ sets. Way too much color intensity, blacks are all wrong, tinted like mad. However, with just a little effort and a couple bucks, you can set things to rights and get the picture you paid for by calibrating your HDTV.

First, the basics…

If you have some understanding of TV settings already, you can skip this next section and get straight to calibrating. If not, then on with the basics.

Room Lighting

The first thing to consider is your room lighting. Your picture will always look better in a light-controlled room. However, you don’t want to watch your TV in a pitch-black room either. It’ll cause eye strain and actually make the picture look worse. Rather, the ideal is to have some dim light directly behind the TV with the rest of the room being dark. There are bulbs that are supposed to simulate daylight that are perfect for this. Check your local hardware store for something in the 6500 Kelvin range. If you’re interested, here’s a quick video on back-lighting your TV. Lastly, make sure you don’t have any other lights in the room that will reflect in your screen, particularly if you have a plasma TV. That will degrade picture quality as well.

Backlight

You’ll only have to worry about this if you have an LCD or LED TV. Basically it’s the amount of light coming from your display. Your TV will be set too hot from the factory, so decreasing this setting will improve your viewing experience. However, be advised that going too low will make your picture less vivid.

It’s tough to get this one set correctly by eye, but you can get pretty close with a dark room and a video with a lot of white in it, maybe something with a lot of snow or something. Watch the video for 10 – 15 minutes. Adjust the backlight until you don’t feel any eye strain or uncomfortable brightness levels. This will actually be instinctive, so just adjust until it feels “right.” Yah, I know, but that’s the truth.

Brightness

Brightness adjusts how black your blacks are. Your set manufacturer may also call it black level for that reason. When this is set too high, it messes up your color balance and makes things look…unnatural. When it’s set too low, you lose detail and dark scenes all blend together.

Contrast

Contrast is also sometimes called “Picture.” It determines the detail of brightly-colored parts in scenes and sets the overall brightness of the picture. Like brightness, set too high and colors are unbalanced; set too low though and blacks look gray and things look muddy and flat.

Color

Oh, the big one. This setting affects the saturation of color for your display. If you’ve ever watched a movie on an old TV where anything red was fuzzy, you’ve seen the effects of color saturation set too high. Color saturation will make colors look garish and unnatural if you’re not careful with it. On the other hand, when you set things too low the picture will be washed out and bland.

Tint

The tint setting allows you to fine-tune your color balance by moving the entire color spectrum from a green to a magenta tint. Typically, you’ll see the greatest impact of this setting in skin tones.

Sharpness

This setting artificially “sharpens” the image by adding edges to objects on the screen. On a high-def set, you will most likely set this to 0 as the image is already plenty sharp and full of detail.

Color Temperature

Color temperature affects the overall color of the picture by changing the basis for all color displayed on your set. Setting it to warm or low will generally give you the best results for movies by increasing reds.

Aspect Ratio

Your aspect ratio determines the shape of your screen. Your HDTV will have a 16:9 ratio, or widescreen format. Your old CRT TV had a 4:3 ratio, or fullscreen format. You’ll probably use both though. Movies generally play in widescreen these days, while TV is still set to fullscreen. That’s why people and objects look stretched when you’re watching regular TV. Setting your aspect ratio to 4:3 temporarily will fix that.

On With Calibration

OK. Now that we’ve gotten some terms covered, let’s get that set looking the way it was meant to.

First, I should mention that you can hire a professional to do this for you if you have a few hundred bucks laying around and are dead set on getting the absolute best possible result. Also, there are other products that will run more thorough tests and provide slightly better tuning. I’ll cover several of them at the end of this article. However, they all run $30+, and I’m way too cheap for that since there’s an almost free option. Yah, that’s more my style; and since you’re here, it’s probably your style too. So, assuming you’d rather spend $5 instead of $300 or even $30, let’s continue.

If you’re like me, when you bought that Pixar or LucasFilm DVD with that silver “THX Certified” logo proudly emblazened across it, you did so expecting the mind-blowing sonic experience that was promised by the brand. However, did you also know that tucked away deep in some set up menu or special features disc there’s a nice little display optimization tool called the “THX Optimizer”? Yep, all you do is pop in the DVD and find the optimizer chapter. It’ll run through a series of tests with easy-to-follow instructions for each explaining how to set your display to “pass” the test.

Below, I’ll give you a brief rundown of what you’ll see in the Optimizer.

Step 1: Contrast

The first test will adjust your Contrast and Picture settings. Essentially what’s you’re doing is getting the blackest blacks and whitest whites you can. Your display will show a white box in eight sections. Around the white box is a black border. All you have to do here is adjust your Picture and Contrast settings so that 1) the eight white boxes are distinct from eachother and 2) they stand out crisply from the black border.

Step 2: Brightness

Next you’ll adjust your Brightness level. You’ll see the “THX” logo surrounded by 10 boxes, each a different degree of black. Really what you’re doing here is making sure that there are gradations of black in your picture. Otherwise dark scenes will all blur together, and you’ll miss out on a lot of detail. In the step 1, we made sure you could get to black. In step 2 we’re fine-tuning that a little. Simple adjust your Brightness settings until seven of the ten boxes are visible.

Step 3: Tint and Color

It’s time to adjust our color and tint settings. These two tests will require the special blue glasses from THX. While it’s not strictly mandatory that you perform these adjustments with the tests and glasses, you really should. The reason you’re reading this all is that you want the best possible picture you can get on your set, and this is how to do it. Besides, you come this far, so why bale now?

Step 3a: Color

For the color chapter of the DVD, you’re screen will be covered with the word “COLOR.” You’ll notice that each letter is a different color. There’s a group of movie/television techs and engineers called the SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) that sets the standards for all kinds of things regarding movies and TV, among them color reproduction. Each letter in “COLOR” is one of the calibrating colors standard set by the SMPTE as a component of accurate color reproduction.

The test is pretty simple. Donning your blue glasses, make each of the letters in “COLOR” the same shade of blue. Piece of cake.

Step 3b: Tint

Adjusting your tint uses the same process as adjusting your color balance in the previous step. Your screen will be covered with the word “TINT,” each letter a different color also dictated by the SMPTE standard. Just put on the blue glasses and make each letter in “TINT” the same shade of blue.

Step 4: Sharpness

Before I continue, be advised that your HDTV set is already plenty crisp and full of detail, so don’t do much with this. Now, having said that, you’ll see a bar with colored sqares on it. Adjust your TV’s Sharpness setting up until the vertical lines look edgy. Now, slowly decrease Sharpness until the squares are crisply defined but do not bleed into each other. For this test, you’re just going by what you like. There’s no optimal setting. Just adjust until it looks good to you.

Step 5: Aspect Ratio Settings Checks

Finally, we’ll make sure aspect ratio settings and alignment are good. If you have a 4:3 or full screen television, you should see two perfectly formed rectangles and one perfect circle. Any lines that appear jagged or non-linear could indicate an issue with your set’s alignment. If you have a 16:9 or widescreen television, change your aspect setting to 4:3 for this test.

Similar to the last test, this final one checks your 16:9 aspect ratio setup. If you have a 4:3 television, you can skip the test as it’s basically a repeat of the last test. For a 16:9 set, you’re again looking for the perfect rectangles and the circle. This test also checks your DVD aspect setting to ensure that it’s optimized for your television’s aspect ratio.

Other Products

Earlier in the article, I alluded to other products that would allow you to fine tune things even further. Here’s a list of a few possible candidates for you.

Digital Video Essentials: Optimize Your Home Entertainment System (DVD)

This is certainly the most professional grade disc of the products mentioned on this page. DVE is sort of the de facto standard for calibration tools. However, with that you should expect menus to be more complicated, more tests to run, etc. This isn’t for the faint of heart. Also, very cool, if you’d like to give it a try, you can pick this guy up on Netflix.

.

.

Digital Video Essentials: HD Basics (Blu-ray)

This disc is a little less complicated and easier to understand for the layman. Rather than just running you through a series of tests, it educates you too on the what’s and why’s of the tests. Also, there’s a section for helping you calibrate your sound system as well, although I generally find there’s a lot of personal preference in that area. Still, it’d give you a good baseline from which to tweak.

.

.

Monster/ISF HDTV Calibration Wizard (DVD)

You’ll get more calibration tools with the previous two offerings, but the Monster/ISF DVD is still the easiest to use, and the information it gives you is really easy to understand. If you’re at all overwhelmed at this process, this is probably the way to go for you. I mean it’s literally narrated, talking you through everything step-by-step.

.

Disney WOW: World of Wonder (DVD)

Disney’s WOW calibration disc is again aimed at the home user rather than the professional. It doesn’t offer as many tools as the DVE options above , but it’s more thorough than the Monster/ISF HDTV Calibration Wizard DVD. It actually does a really good job of satisfying both the home theater novice and the home theater enthusiast who wants to tinker a little bit more with their setup.

.

A Job Well Done

And there you have it. You’ve now completed a set of basic calibration tests, and your display looks awesome.  Congratulations on your successful HDTV calibration.