Getting the Perfect Calibration

When calibrating your television to achieve the best image possible, it is important to keep in mind that there are four major settings that you will need to play around with. These include:

· Tint – controls the hue of the image. The tint is usually set correctly and won’t need to be changed.
· Brightness – controls the black level, which means turning up the brightness is actually turning down the black level.
· Sharpness – creates a crisper image by adding false information. On HD televisions, this feature generally should be lowered.
· Contrast – also referred to as “Picture” on some sets and actually controls the brightness of the image.

In order to calibrate DVD settings, you might want to consider purchasing a calibration DVD. With the help of these DVDs, you can get all of your settings to look just the way you want them. Of course, this doesn’t help you a whole lot when it comes to your cable or satellite connection.

To work around this problem, you can simply jot down the settings you created for the DVD player and use those same settings for other systems. The downside to this is that the same settings don’t necessarily work from one input to the next, particularly when you are using an HDMI cable for one device and a coaxial cable for another.

Unfortunately, there currently are no calibration devices that are not disc based. So, you will just have to do your best to eyeball it when it comes to calibrating your television for devices that do not use discs. DsiplayMate, however, is working on getting a USB-based calibration tool on the market and hopes to have it available in the fall. When this becomes available, it could solve these problems for those of you that want a perfect picture every time.