No one is completely happy with how their TV looks right out of the box. It’s too bright, the colors are too warm, or too cold. Something about the picture is justoff. This doesn’t look as good as the demo model you saw on the floor!
Did you get a lemon? No! Don’t panic. You can get your TV to look just the way you want (or as close as it can manage) by simply adjusting a few settings. Except, what the heck is “tint”? Let’s tackle this TV elephant one bite at a time.
Why Calibration Matters
Calibration isn’t just about being a TV snob. No TV is going to look its best shoved into a random living room. Every situation is different, and that’s why TVs let you adjust almost every aspect of the picture to make optimization possible.
If you don’t do at least a little tweaking, you’re likely to end up with missing detail, washed-out, incorrect colors, and something nowhere close to what the content creators intended. The good news is that getting your TV dialed in is easier than ever and modern TVs can often get you close to where a guy with a colorimeter and an invoice for his time could.
Picture Modes: What They Actually Mean
Picture modes are presets on your TV that set all the different toggles and sliders to certain values. These are basically pre-calibrations meant for specific purposes.
In most cases, my go-to for a quick and dirty setup is to start with “Movie” or “Filmmaker” mode and then adjust the picture from there.
Brightness, Contrast, and Backlight Aren’t the Same
These three sliders sound interchangeable. They’re not!
Backlight (or OLED Light) controls panel brightness. Adjust this based on your room lighting. Bright for daylight, dim for nighttime. Many modern TVs have a light sensor that adjusts this automatically, and some even do a good job. If you have the automatic setting turned on, then you may hav the option to specify the minimim and maximum backlight or OLED Light level.
Brightness doesn’t actually set the overall luminance of the screen the way the above setting does. It’s confusing and on some TVs the labeling is inconsistent, but what it actually does is set black level. Turn it up too high and blacks look gray; too low, and you lose shadow detail. If the TV has a separate black level setting, brightness might actually be luminance. Best to check what effect each slider has on a test image to be sure.
Contrast effectively controls the white level, or rather it adjusts the difference between white and black levels. Too high and you crush highlights; too low, and the image looks flat.
In general, you’re aiming to set these levels so that no detail is lost in the darkest and brightest parts of a scene. Black should look black, and pure white should look white.
Color Controls: Saturation, Tint, and Color Temperature
With these settings, we’re definitely in the “personal preference” department, though they’re also useful when an image looks unnatural. That is made a little harder given that movies and shows have also been color-graded, and sometimes that grading gives the picture a deliberately unnatural look.
Use test footage that aims to look natural, like a nature documentary, as your baseline, instead of trying to tune the green out ofThe Matrix.
No guidance here. If it looks good to you, then it’s good. You weirdo.
Sharpness: Less Is More
Sharpness doesn’t make your image sharper—it adds artificial edge enhancement. On modern HD and 4K sets, this usually introduces noise and haloing. Unless you’re watching low-res YouTube, turn it way down, or off entirely. The actual detail is already in the image.
One of the first things I do on any TV is turning the sharpness dial all the way down to zero. Even on my old CRT TVs. I’ve never seen it make things better, personally.
Motion Settings: The Soap Opera Offender
You know that weird smooth look where movies feel like cheap home videos? That’s motion interpolation, a.k.a. the “soap opera effect.” TV manufacturers love it; directors hate it. I hate it. You should hate it too.
Different manufacturers have different names for it, like MotionFlow (Sony), TruMotion (LG), and Auto Motion Plus (Samsung), but it’s pretty much the same thing.
Some TVs let you adjust things like judder separately, and in that case you do want one or two clicks of judder correction so that panning shots in 24fps footage don’t hop and skip. What you don’t want is footage that looks like it runs at 60fps. Apart from looking awful, this can also introduce all sorts of artifacts, so stay away.
Advanced Settings You Might Not Need (but Are Good to Know)
The settings above are what most people should tweak a little, but there are a few more advanced ones that you might want to play with under some circumstances.
As I said, most of the time you can leave these alone, but just remember what the old setting was before changing anything.
The Best Way to Calibrate Without Fancy Tools
There is absolutely nothing wrong with paying a professional to come out to your home and tune the ears off your TV so it can put its best foot forward. That said, if you just want to get close, you have a few options.
If you own a Apple TV and an iPhone, you have the interesting option of doing calibration using a special test pattern on the screen and your phone’s cameras. This works great, but it only affects the footage coming from the Apple TV, so any other connected devices or the TV’s internal apps need calibration separately. If you only watch stuff using the Apple TV—job’s done.
Another option is Dolby Vision. If your TV and playback device both support Dolby Vision—turn it on! This standard ensures that the TV shows footage as intended, as long as it is mastered for Dolby Vision.
Even with non-Dolby Vision movies and shows, the baseline settings here are excellent. Your natural reaction might be that it’s too dark, or not saturated enough, but give your eyes time to adjust. Trust me, this is how movies should be seen.
If you don’t have access to any of that, here’s a quick-and-dirty recipe:
For most people, most of the time, that should get you pretty close. However, I have to stress that, ultimately, if something looks good to you,then it is good. Don’t feel like you have to follow conventions if you don’t actually like the resulting image!
Your TV is probably capable of doing a much better job than it’s managing right now, and all that stands between you and a better watching experience is grabbing your remote and stabbing a few buttons with your fingers.
