What I'm about to tell you might not make any sense. In fact, it might even upset you a little. But I'm your friend, and I've promised to tell you the truth about your A/V gear, so it's a risk I'm willing to take. Here goes: Your TV doesn't look right.
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| Test patterns for adjusting sharpness (top) and contrast (bottom). |
You know I'm not a doom-and-gloomer and that I wouldn't bring up a problem that couldn't be fixed. But before we get to the solution, I'm going to tell you why your set needs some professional TLC.
Blinded by the Light
It would seem logical to assume that people would want to buy the TV with the best picture. But this is America, and we tend to like things bigger, louder, and faster. When it comes to TV, the brightest set — not necessarily the best one — usually wins. And don't think that TV manufacturers don't know that.
The typical store has rows of TVs lined up side by side under strips of fluorescent lighting. It takes an awfully bright picture to overcome that light and an even brighter one to stand out from the crowd. So the manufacturers design their sets so they can sit on a shelf amid all the other TVs in a brightly lit store and scream, "Look at me! I'm the brightest!" When you take your new HDTV out of the box and place it in a less harshly lit environment like your home theater, the picture is going to be off — way off.
Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right
To make a TV as bright as possible — or, more accurately, to make it put out the maximum light — manufacturers set the contrast control (sometimes called the "picture" control) to maximum. But that's like constantly driving your car around near the red line: You can do it, but it will reduce your engine's life span. Also, in digital displays — plasma, DLP, LCD, and so on — it causes "clipping," where signal information is actually lost. (For instance, it can cause a snowy background to blend into a single white blur instead of showing subtle shades of white.) It can also cause the TV to produce gray instead of a true black.
Manufacturers also often set the color temperature (measured in kelvins) too high, making the picture too blue. To keep everyone from looking hypothermic, they adjust the color decoder. Juicing the red level a bit ("red push") brings a nice, healthy glow back to people.
Problem solved, right? Wrong, because now people can look sunburned and colors can be biased toward red. This is most noticeable in yellows, which will look orange. And objects that are red will look exaggerated.
Try This at Home
Now for the good news: A few minutes with a test disc can make a world of difference. The AVIA Guide to Home Theater, Digital Video Essentials, and Sound & Vision Home Theater Tune-Up DVDs will walk you through several adjustments you can make to produce a significantly better picture. (See "Step by Step: How to Calibrate Your HDTV".)
But even if you're too cheap or lazy to get a disc, there's still hope. Most sets made this millennium feature preset video modes with names like Movie, Cinema, Pro, or Pure that will lower the contrast, select a more appropriate color temperature, and disable lots of the "enhancements" (such as scan-velocity modulation or noise reduction) that actually rob your picture of fine detail.
Going All the Way
Unfortunately, engaging a preset or running through some test patterns can't fix everything. For your set to live up to its potential, it needs to have its grayscale adjusted — and for that you need Imaging Science Foundation (ISF) calibration. (See "Picture Perfect: TV Calibration Demystified".) If you consider yourself a videophile, you can't go on watching movies knowing that the colors are wrong. So do yourself and your TV a favor — get a test disc and adjust the user controls for now, and then contact an ISF calibrator (go to imagingscience.com/isf-trained.cfm or call 561-997-9073 to find one near you) to let your set be all that it can be!
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