Losing Yourself in HDTV Is a Few Tweaks Away - NYTimes.com
Monday, June 22, 2009 at 04:55PM Losing Yourself in HDTV Is a Few Tweaks Away
By ERIC A. TAUB
Most likely, there’s nothing wrong with your TV; but unlike the admonition in the classic science-fiction series “The Outer Limits,” this is one time when you do need to adjust your set.
When you watched that new LCD or plasma set in the store, you saw a picture that was meant to grab your eye. The best way to do that in a bright, noisy, fluorescent-lit place is to crank up the brightness, pump up the colors and set the LCD backlight on max.
Which is the worst thing you can do when you get the TV home.
What works well in Best Buy and Wal-Mart will not give you the same enviable results at home. Your living room is (hopefully) not lighted with fluorescents. Warmer lighting demands different settings from a TV to produce pleasing, natural-looking colors and images.
Set manufacturers try to make the job easy by providing a number of preset picture modes. Variously labeled “vivid” (the one used in stores), “cinema,” “game,” and “custom,” they are attempts to take the guesswork out of getting the best picture in your home. But as every home is different, creating the right picture for your place requires a few minutes’ simple tweaking.
Turn Down the Lights
“This is the No. 1 thing to do,” said Mark Schubin, an Emmy-winning television engineer and a technical consultant for the Metropolitan Opera. The picture’s contrast ratio — a commonly used specification that indicates the range of brightness from white to black — is measured in absolutely pitch-black rooms. But no one’s room is absolutely pitch black, and the brighter your room, the more likely your TV will lack detail in the darker parts of an image. If you cannot lower your room’s lighting, make sure that direct light does not hit the screen, it will wash out the picture.
LCD TVs create their images with a fluorescent or LED backlight; typically they are turned to their maximum setting at the factory. Gary Merson, owner of HDTVGuru.com, recommends turning them down to at least half that level.
Set the Brightness
A picture’s black level is controlled by the TV’s brightness adjustment; it needs to be set dark enough so that the screen displays rich, deep blacks. Set too low, many images will lose their detail. Set the black level too high, the picture will look muddy.
Black level is important because the truer the blacks, the greater the perceived sharpness of the TV image. A muddy picture will look less sharp than one that has true blacks.
To get the proper black level, you can use a PLUGE pattern, which typically consists of six vertical bars of varying black levels. Turn the picture level down until one of the bars disappears against the background. PLUGE patterns, and other patterns discussed here, are available on a variety of TV tuning discs.
Users can choose Digital Video Essentials, created by the industry expert Joe Kane, or the Avia II Guide to Home Theater. In addition, more than 300 DVD and Blu-ray movies, like “The Abyss,” the Indiana Jones series, and “Titanic,” include a range of calibration patterns created by THX, the company whose familiar certification logo precedes many movies (for a complete list go to thx.com/home/dvd).
If you prefer to wing it, you can make the adjustments without buying a calibration disc. For example, while watching a dark scene in a movie, turn the brightness/picture control down until the detailed areas in a dark part of the frame disappear, then turn it back up until you can just make out some detail.
Adjust the Contrast
Now that you have set the picture’s black level, you can maximize the image’s whites using the contrast control. The trick is to adjust the set to get the best white level while still maintaining detail in the whites. You don’t want the whites to be so intense that, when you look at a bright scene, it looks as if you’re in a whiteout on a ski slope.
Again, the simplest way to do the adjustment is to use a pattern on a tuning disc or as part of a THX-certified DVD. Otherwise, find a bright scene on a movie — a woman’s white wedding dress, for example — and adjust the contrast control so the dress retains detail, like fabric folds or buttons, without becoming a mass of indistinguishable white.
Keep the Color in Check
Most sets display colors that are much more saturated than in real life, making the world look like a comic book. At first, softer, natural colors may look too muted, but after a few days you will find them more pleasing.
Adjust the color control until people look the way you would expect them to in real life: Turn the color down until it almost disappears, then raise it until you get to the desired level.
Next, look at some grass and make sure the greens look correct. If not, you may need to tweak the color control. Because the color and the hue controls interact, it may be necessary to go back and forth between the two until you get the color right.
If you can’t tell one face from another or have no idea what color grass really is, color bars on the testing discs help automate the process. To make it work, you adjust the color control while looking at a series of differently colored bars through a blue filter, until the entire pattern looks uniform.
Filters are included with tuning discs; if you use a THX pattern on a DVD, you can buy blue filter glasses for $2 from THX’s Web site.
Note the Time of Day
The settings you have created will be appropriate for the time of day that they were made. If you did the settings during the brightest part of the day, the contrast control will need to be lowered at night. All other controls should be able to remain the same.
Consider the Source
On many modern TVs, setting the picture controls when watching a DVD or Blu-ray disc will not affect the settings when you move to another input, like satellite TV. In that case, you will need to readjust the settings for that other program source. As long as you have written down the settings, that should be simple.
Save Some Money
Now that you have spent several thousand dollars on a new flat-panel TV and a surround sound system, you may be tempted to kick in a few hundred more to buy top-of-the-line cables to connect every component.
One word of advice: don’t.
“Cheap cables that cost 75 cents per foot work as well as those that cost $100 per foot,” said Mr. Kane. “With the latest HDMI cables, if you see a picture and hear the sound, you know it works.”