How to calibrate your TV for better picture quality

A common problem with TVs is that they often don’t deliver the best picture quality out of the box. Even though they promise picture perfect experience, the TVs are often set to bright, oversaturated modes to stand out. While these settings are ideal for stores to successfully attract customers, they are far from ideal for home viewing.

In order to get the most accurate colours, sharp contrast, and balanced brightness from your TV, you need to do proper calibration. While professional calibration is an expensive and time-consuming process requiring special equipment, you can basically calibrate your TV at home for better picture quality than what came out of the box. 

Set up television: Steps to follow before calibration

Before you set up your TV for calibration, you need to ensure that your TV is in the right environment. Here is how you can prepare your TV for calibration:

1. Choose the right room lighting

The most crucial parameter in TV calibration is lighting conditions, and before you begin to calibrate your TV, make sure your TV is placed in a room with normal lighting, neither too dark nor too bright. You should also avoid direct sunlight or harsh reflections on the screen.

2. High-quality source

Once you have placed your TV in the right lighting conditions, make sure you use a high-quality source for content. Playing high-resolution content from Blu-ray or a 4K streaming service will allow you to better understand the output, and while doing this, set your TV to its highest resolution, 4K or 1080p depending on the model.

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3. Disable default settings

There are some default settings such as motion smoothing and energy-saving modes that are enabled to limit power consumption. For a natural look, turn off motion smoothing and disable energy-saving mode to ensure that the TV does not dim the picture or reduce contrast.

Perfect picture settings: Step-by-step calibration

Now that you know how to set up your TV, here is a step-by-step guide to calibrate your TV for better picture quality.

1. Select the right picture mode

The first step is to select the right picture mode. Modern TVs come with several preset picture modes and to calibrate your TV for better picture quality, choose from either movie or cinema mode, calibrated mode, or game mode. For best results, always avoid vivid or dynamic mode.

2. Adjust brightness and contrast

Once you have set the right picture mode, change the brightness and contrast on your TV. Since brightness controls the darkest part of the picture, set it to ensure that dark areas remain detailed without looking too grey. Contrast, on the other hand, helps control the brightest parts of the image and you can increase it until white areas look bright but don’t lose details.

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3. Colour, tint, and sharpness

You can change colour or saturation to adjust skin tones to look natural and keep tint/hue neutral (0) unless colours look too green or red.

4. Sharpness and motion settings

To reduce noise and grains from your picture, reduce sharpness and turn off motion smoothing to make movies look smooth and natural.

In addition to the above simple steps, you can also use calibration disks or test patterns to fine-tune your settings. You can also choose to create different settings to meet individual needs. The above steps aren’t very complex and are designed to deliver the best picture quality on TV.