You can check that the picture geometry is correct with the Spears & Munsil disc. Don't select anything called Wide, Zoom, 3:4, or 16:9. Make sure it's set to Normal or Just Scan. Look for a button on your remote or a setting in your Picture menu called Aspect Ratio, Picture Size, or Zoom. This can be a problem for cable boxes if you're flipping between HD and SD channels, but otherwise you should be able to set everything up to display pictures at their native resolution.
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No matter how you adjust other settings, your TV will look best if it's set to display whatever you're watching in the right aspect ratio. Our guide to refresh rates offers a deeper explanation of what these modes do and whether it matters that your TV is 60, 120, or 240Hz. Motion enhancements have their place, often in live sports or video games, but most movies and TV shows are much more pleasant to watch with them turned off. Incidentally, disabling any motion-enhancing features will reduce that jarring soap opera effect most people dislike. While you're there, make sure Overscan is turned off, if it's an option (this will help in the next step). Disable any feature with the words Adaptive, Dynamic, Motion, Processing, or Smoothing. In your TV's picture settings menu, look for any submenu that sounds like Advanced Picture, Expert Picture, or Picture Options. You need to make sure the test patterns you're looking at are displayed with fixed settings and that the TV isn't adjusting them while you're working. They have their place, but they're the bane of calibration. Your TV probably comes with several options designed to let it tweak the picture settings on the fly to ideally suit whatever you're looking at. For most consumers, the warmest color temperature preset will do the job.
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You can get pinpoint precision for color levels with a full white balance/RGBCMY calibration, but that requires a calibration professional with special equipment. This works with the picture mode to produce, for most modern TVs, fairly accurate colors across the board.
Once you find a mode that seems right, look for the Color Temperature setting and make sure it's set to Warm. Use the Warmest Color Temperature Setting Stay away from any Vivid, Game, or Sports modes. If those aren't available, look for Custom. Otherwise, look for any Cinema or Theater mode and start from there. Ideally, your television will have an ISF picture mode, which means it provides a complete suite of settings to perform a full calibration (you won't need to touch most of them that's for professionals).
This is the general mode that dictates many of your television's individual picture settings, and often enables some of the higher-level options for making calibration adjustments. You'll get the best results by starting in the correct picture mode. However, if you're interested in how TV calibration works, or you want to tweak your picture on a more granular level, read on. They also tend to be quite accurate when displaying a high dynamic range (HDR) signal, and in both cases show very good contrast performance as well.īy following our guide to the best picture settings for your TV, you can get a viewing experience that's about as close to ideal as a given panel can get without going through a more exacting calibration process. Now, before getting started, I will note that the majority of TVs I've tested over the past two years offer excellent standard dynamic range (SDR) color accuracy out of the box, many times being spot-on with broadcast standards when using the proper picture preset.
It comes with extensive instructions both on the disc and in the included booklet, but many of them are unnecessary and can be simply disregarded unless you're a professional and familiar with TV calibration to begin with. The Spears & Munsil disc is a very useful tool for anyone looking to calibrate their TV or just understand more about how video signals work, and is recommended by ISF founder and president Joel Silver.