When you go to the mall and you happen to be in the TV department, you can be surprised by the visual quality of the screens, which are really bright and with perfect colors, which seem much better than what we have at home. The truth, however, is that on most televisions, there are predefined settings designed specifically for one purpose: to sell the television. Basically each TV on sale is calibrated to distinguish itself from the one next to it, with a different configuration of the image parameters.
The TVs on display in the exhibition halls of the shops are usually with a very bright image and with very intense colors, but these settings (often activated via the Demo, Vivid or Shop mode ), which have an excellent performance in bright environments cannot go well at home where settings must be changed with Cinema or Film mode, which is often the most optimized in real colors and gamma settings.
In this guide, therefore, we see how to calibrate the TV so that colors, contrast and brightness are optimal for the rendering of each image .
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Not being able to try this mode (I don't have a BLuRay player), we see much more simply what are the best basic settings for an HD TV, which should be identical in every model of TV Sony, LG, Philips, Panasonic or other brands.
To help us configure the best possible calibration of colors and moving images, you can download an app like THX TuneUP for iPhone and then connect your mobile phone to the TV and project the images and the app on the big screen. The app is free although not compatible with every Android phone and does not work with the Chromecast (you need to use an HDMI cable).
The application is very good especially when you need to adjust the color, because it uses the phone or tablet camera to turn the device into a red filter. You can then configure the color on the TV until the red box disappears.
A similar app for Android can be Screen Test while an alternative that works with the CHromecast is, instead, Display Tester, which also works to calibrate the TV screen.
Proceeding instead in manual mode, to avoid that the images are too bright and too intense in color (too much saturation), you must open the menu for setting the image on the TV to choose one of the proposed presets that is not that of the shop or even what is called Lively, Dynamic or Intense. As mentioned above, in almost every TV the best mode to use is Cinema, which should be fine for everything.
If you still want to improve, you can use, if present, the THX or ISF Expert mode . These are pre-calibrated methods established by the standardization bodies which are absolutely optimized, even if with a limitation, that of not knowing anything about the environment in which the TV is located. In fact, it is not possible to give precise indications on the values to be used for each parameter of the image settings since everything depends on the light and colors in the room in which you are. In general, you can change the Expert or Cinema mode by properly calibrating the following settings :
1) Brightness : On a TV, brightness controls the depth of black on the screen
If you can connect your PC to the TV or if the TV has a USB socket to insert a stick or an external hard disk, you can view this calibration image and adjust the brightness control so that you can barely see the shadow behind the THX logo.
Another calibration pattern is this which involves adjusting the brightness until you see the lines on the right from the 17th.
2) Contrast : this setting adjusts the difference between the brightest and darkest point of the image.
Generally, on LED LCD screens it should always be kept low enough.
You can try the calibration using this image, changing the contrast until the eight gray rectangles are clearly and clearly seen, your contrast is fine.
Another pattern to calibrate the contrast is this, where you need to increase the contrast only as long as the lines 230-234 are visible. Another very simple way to adjust the contrast is to watch a film with black bands above and below. These horizontal bars must be black and even darker than the black that you see when the credits go. Then increase the brightness until the black bands appear gray and then reduce it until they are black. Keep in mind that changing contrast also changes brightness so you will have to go back to check if the brightness is fine.
3) Color : This setting adjusts the color saturation, i.e. how intense it is, if it is too high, the colors spoil the outlines of the images while too low you have a black and white TV. The best way to calibrate this parameter is to try special filters through an app like the THX one seen above. Otherwise you can create a moderately bright environment and go by eye, increasing the color until you can see the outlines no longer defined. On some TVs such as LG you can calibrate the color using the very convenient Picture Wizard function.
Otherwise it is possible to clip the brightness using this model and looking at it with a blue filter glasses.
4) Tint or Hue is the setting that controls the tint of the image between the red and green extremes.
Usually it remains fixed at 0, unless you notice colors tending to red or green.
5) Sharpness always has to do with the contrast and the edges of the figures in the images.
High definition images usually need little or no enhancement of sharpness.
If you want an adjustment model you can use this.
6) Backlighting is instead the regulation of the light of the screen, which for energy saving should keep not at the maximum, even if you sacrifice a little the brightness of the images.
Be careful, however, that adjusting one of these settings also changes the other ones, therefore you must always re-check the various values and go on until you are satisfied. On some TVs there are also other improvement options such as dynamic contrast and soap opera effect or " Trumotion " which is absolutely convenient to disable. Ideally, you should also change the brightness setting day and night.
Image quality varies according to the time of day (if the TV is in a room with a window) so a brighter image during the day and a darker one at night should be preferred. If possible you can use a preset day and night, or, without changing the brightness parameter, use the energy saving option.
If you want you can also try to adjust the TV screen by connecting it to a computer and using the monitor adjustment tools.
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