How to calibrate an LCD TV

After settling your brand new LCD Television snugly in a perfect position on the wall, you sit back and think: Now what? Well, you switch on power, that’s what! But wait, before you do so, be warned: The pictures might not look all that alluring as they were in the glitzy showcase of the store. In fact, you could also be shocked big time by the shameless display of garish colours. Now what do you do? Relax, you’ve not been fooled. All new TV sets will be set to show off images in the brightest and most attractive angle. A few tweaks here and a few tweaks there, and the TV could be made fit enough to suit the lighting conditions of your room. Here are a few easy steps to calibrate your LCD TV.

Preliminary Warm-up:

Before you jump right into calibrating your TV, give it some time to relax. Make sure that you give it at least half of an hour for warming up before you start calibrating it. This is to get all the components operating under normal viewing conditions.

Step – 1:

Before you begin calibrating the TV, it’s best to make sure that the lighting conditions of the room are in good order. Movies should never be watched with all the lights turned off – neither should they be watched in an excessively lit room. The trick is to balance both. Darkening the rest of the room while placing a dim light right behind the HD TV is a good idea. Also ensure that there’s no light directly reflecting off the screen.

Step – 2:

The following are the controls that you would have to tweak:

• Backlight

• Colour

• Brightness

• Contrast

• Sharpness

• Saturation

• Hue

First and foremost, play a scene from a DVD movie that has black bars above and below the picture, a mix of bright and dark shades with a bit of shadow detail thrown in. Go to the LCD TV’s backlight settings and dim the backlight to how much ever makes for comfortable viewing. This setting would have been set at it’s highest possible value to give the picture an artificial glow back at the store.

Step – 3:

Fine-tune the brightness setting of the TV. Note that too much of brightness can make the picture look washed-out and too little of it can make the picture looks like one dark mambo jumbo. Keep an eye on shadow detail when you adjust the brightness. For example, if the eyes of the actors seem to have disappeared in to the shadowy spot near their brows, it means that the brightness has been set too low.

Step – 4:

It’s now time to adjust the contrast. Pause the DVD with a white image on the screen, say a white feathery bird. Tweak the contrast till you can make out every detail on the white plumage clearly.

Step – 5:

If there’s a DVD of an animation movie, say Kung Fu Panda around, play it, for its time for us to play with colours. Adjust the colour setting of the TV such that the colour tones of the characters do not look gaudy. Watch for the brighter shades like reds and yellows as you calibrate and stop when you feel like the colours are that which suit your taste. The hue control generally controls the balance of the primary colours. Fine-tune it to the level that’s comely to your eyes.

Step – 6:

Adjusting the sharpness level is one of the most important steps in the calibration of an LCD TV. Sharpness is something that the eyes can perceive and cannot be explained in clear terms. But there’s a myth about sharpness which goes like this: “The higher the sharpness, the better.” This is absolutely wrong. It is advisable that you do not turn up the sharpness to the maximum. This may result in the picture looking artificially enhanced, which may be a bit of an eye-sore. Keep the sharpness setting in the lowest position possible – turn it up if your eyes catch sight of softening around the edge of text and numbers.

Sit back and study the impact on the pictures after fine-tuning all the above settings. Refine the picture more, if you feel that its required. Else, sit back and relax with a can of chilled beer!

Related posts:

1. How to calibrate your HDTV LCD Television
2. How to improve the picture quality on your LCD TV
3. Guidelines for understanding the contrast ratios for LCD TVs
4. Recent developments in LCD technology
5. Why should you buy an LED TV this Christmas anyway?