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Thread: Max your HD TV

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    Moderator thelostone's Avatar
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    Max your HD TV

    A bit long winded but i hope it helps some one

    It's a sad but undeniable truth that most people who've forked out for lovely new HD TVs aren't getting anywhere near the best out of them.
    For starters, recent research from the British Video Association suggests that as many as six million people who own HD TVs aren't feeding it any HD sources. So if you happen to be one of those, you will find that adding a Freeview/Freesat HD receiver, Blu-ray player and/or HD games console will immediately raise your TV's performance massively! You can have that one 'for free', though; it's not going to count as one of our 10 ways to improve your HD TV's picture quality.
    Instead, the 10 tips are
    1. Reduce the picture's contrast and brightness settings
    Sadly, the vast majority of TVs ship with pretty awful picture presets - mostly because manufacturers are more interested in creating pictures that stand out from the crowd (with ultra-vivid colours and high brightness levels) than they are in creating pictures that are actually accurate and believable.
    The single biggest culprits here are the brightness and contrast settings, with one or often both being set far higher than they should be. This can lead to excessive video noise levels, poor black level response, bleached bright picture elements, and unnatural, unsubtle colours. In other words, these settings can sell your TV severely short.
    With every TV having different image characteristics and different setting parameters, it's impossible for us to provide you with exact settings you should use for contrast and brightness. But as a general rule, we'd suggest reducing brightness levels to around 50% of their maximum value, and contrast to between 65 and 75% of its maximum value.
    If your TV also has a backlight control, you should play around with this too, focusing on trying to get the right balance between removing greyness from black parts of the picture and allowing shadow detail to remain in dark picture areas.
    2. Make sure you're using the right connections
    This one sounds simple, but it's startling how many people don't realise that you have to connect an HD source to your HD TV by component video or HDMI cables in order to get HD pictures on your screen. Scarts, composite video or S-Video connections just won't do.
    Also recommended that you opt for an HDMI connection over a component video one if you have the choice, since the HDMI allows for a pure, all-digital signal transmission while the component route requires digital HD signals to be converted to analogue for the transmission process.
    3. Reduce the light levels in your room
    Although this one won't be practical for everyone, if you can dim your lights, close your blinds/curtains and/or change the position of your TV so that it isn't sitting in direct sunlight, than the benefits to your TV's performance can be considerable.
    There are two reasons for this. The first is that if your room is excessively bright, you will be more tempted to ramp up the brightness and contrast settings on your TV, resulting in the problems noted in tip one.
    The second issue concerns the 'Eco' features found on many TVs now, which can adjust the picture in response to an assessment of ambient light levels. If your room is very bright and you have this auto-adjust feature active (it often is on TVs' default settings), you will find your TV automatically pushing up the contrast and brightness all by itself, with the usual problems. In doing so, of course, your TV will also be eating more electricity than it would if you could control your light and thus end up with reduced screen brightness levels.
    4. Check your viewing angle
    If you own an LCD or LCD TV with LED backlighting, your set's picture performance can be quite radically affected by the angle from which you watch your TV. Watch the vast majority of LCD TVs from an angle of more than 40 degrees or so and you will see both colour and contrast drop off considerably.
    So if any or all of your viewing positions require watching from such angles, i strongly recommend that you try and adjust your room layout. Or else change your TV for a plasma model, since plasma TVs offer much wider realistic viewing angles!
    5. Turn off noise reduction circuitry
    For some daft reason, the majority of TVs leave their video noise reduction circuitry switched on even when you're watching HD pictures. In the vast majority of cases this is not only completely unnecessary, but actually reduces the quality of high definition picture reproduction.
    This is because all but the most expensive and rigorous noise reduction systems tend to soften pictures as they go about their business - and inevitably when an HD picture gets softened, it looks less detailed, less crisp and basically less HD.
    Thankfully almost all TVs allow you to deactivate their noise reduction processing, and i strongly urge that you do so whenever you're watching HD sources if you want to see them at their sharp best.
    6. Be careful with video processing options
    Although the noise reduction systems on TVs are a near-universal problem when it comes to HD pictures, issues also sometimes surround other video processing options.
    This is generally because not all video processors are equal, be it in terms of either their raw processing power or the quality/cleverness of their algorithms. And so all too often processes that are supposed to improve pictures - like motion smoothers, dynamic contrast boosters, edge and colour enhancers - can actually spoil things, by generating unwanted side effects such as shimmering around edges, smearing, obvious flickering during dark/bright transitions, a dearth of detail in dark areas, and unnatural colour tones.
    As a general rule, i would advise seldom if ever setting any picture processing tool higher than its 'minimum' or 'low' setting, and would also recommend that you don't be afraid to adjust the processing quite regularly - including potentially turning elements of it off completely - depending on what sort of source material you're watching. Just trust what your eyes tell you.
    7. Turn off overscanning
    Overscanning, if you've never heard the term before, refers to the practice of pushing the extremities of the image off the edges of the visible screen on your TV. This is done because traditionally, with standard definition sources, these edges tended to contain noise or broadcast data not meant to be part of the visible picture.
    However, with HD pictures this extraneous edge data is not usually an issue. After all, a full HD picture is made of 1920x1080 pixels, and full HD TVs of the sort that now make up the vast majority of HD Ready TVs also contain 1920x1080 pixels. So HD pictures and HD screens are perfectly made for each other, with exact pixel-for-pixel translation.
    It follows from this, then, that if you leave overscanning on with HD pictures, two unwanted things happen. First, some of the picture unnecessarily gets pushed off the screen. But worse than this, in our opinion, is the fact that in pushing the edges of the picture out, the TV is having to apply scaling processing to the HD picture. Which almost inevitably means a slight loss of resolution and accuracy compared with what you get if you just leave HD pictures mapped to a screen pixel by pixel.
    All full HD TVs worth their salt let you deactivate overscanning. Some actually have a feature called overscanning on/off, while other TVs include the no-overscan option within their aspect ratio selection menu, usually under a name such as 'Just Scan' or 'Exact Scan'.
    8. Make sure your HD sources are outputting the correct picture format for your TV
    HD is a two-way street, so it's not just your TV that needs to be set up right. You also need to double check that your HD source has been set to output the best resolution for your TV. If you have a full HD TV, you should be checking that your Blu-ray player, HD broadcast receiver or games console has been set to output 1920x1080. If you have a 1280x720 HD TV, then you should select that output option if it is available, so that your HD source and HD screen match up as accurately as possible, thereby removing one degree of scaling processing from the source-to-screen journey.
    9. Take care with your TV's sharpness controls
    Every TV we can think of features a seemingly innocuous sharpness control among its picture adjustments. But actually this control can have a large and often ruinous impact on picture quality.
    The basic problem is that as soon as you start shifting the sharpness setting from its 'ground zero' starting point (usually given a value of zero by most manufacturers) you're basically messing around with the native appearance of the picture, artificially adding or removing detail and crispness. And as you're probably starting to realise by now, anything that messes with the purity of an HD feed - especially if you're able to achieve pixel for pixel HD mapping with your TV - in our opinion generally spoils rather than enhances HD picture quality.
    I personally never take our sharpness controls out of neutral, but I guess you could try nudging it up just a touch if you feel your TV's HD pictures don't look quite as sharp as you'd like. Just don't overdo it!
    10. Use a calibration disc or expert to help fine-tune your pictures If you really want to make sure your TV is performing to the absolute best of its ability, i would strongly recommend that you invest in a specialist Blu-ray calibration disc, or else push the boat out further and get a professional in to calibrate your TV for you.
    Last edited by thelostone; 12-10-2010 at 09:14 PM.

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  3. #2
    Legend billyboy1963's Avatar
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    Re: Max your HD TV

    some very useful advice thanks

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    Forum Supporter Magnu420's Avatar
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    Re: Max your HD TV

    maybe braveheart should read this then it gives him an idea to set his
    new tv up and proper Hidden Content
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    Elite Member Diablo13's Avatar
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    Re: Max your HD TV

    Great post lost, very informative.
    I will try some adjustments out when I have more time later. Hidden Content

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