<p>If you are close to spending thousands of dollars on a TV because you want a better picture, you may want to save your money. You can almost certainly make your TV’s picture look better than it did when the set was brand-new, and doing so is relatively easy.<br /><br /></p>.<p>Virtually every mass-produced TV is set by default to stand out in a store display. That means TVs come out of the box with the picture set to be bright, with overly saturated colours and digital sharpening. Kevin Miller, a consultant to several TV manufacturers, calls it the “Best Buy Torch Mode.”<br /><br />The manufacturers, Miller said, do not know “if their set is going to be on a wall with 45 other TVs in a Best Buy or a consumer’s home.”<br /><br />In your darkened living room, though, that bright screen is painful to watch. But the bright screen and many other TV ills can be fixed for nothing by changing a few settings. You can improve your TV’s picture even more if you are willing to spend a few dollars for test discs, or make it nearly perfect by hiring a professional to calibrate your set.<br /><br />Basic settings <br /><br />The most obvious fix is to turn off Torch Mode. That may require doing something many people loathe - consult the owner’s manual. But it could come in handy.<br /><br />Then find your TV’s menus. Look for an option named something like “screen settings” or “modes” (manufacturers use different names).<br /><br />Under screen settings, you should see options like Vivid, Games, Sports and Cinema. The truest picture generally comes from the setting with a name like Movie, Cinema or Theatre. Those settings give the picture a more film-like appearance. The THX setting usually gets you closest to movie-theatre style.<br /><br />If you want to go a step further, you can change the modes to suit what you are watching at the time. “Put it in Sports mode when you watch sports, Game mode when you play games,” said Josh Kairoff, who was the director of display engineering for Pioneer. “If you watch sports in Movie mode, it isn’t going to look that good.”<br /><br />If you don’t want to constantly change settings, stick with the one for the kind of viewing you do most often, and test the picture at the time of day you watch most often. Room light makes a big difference in which looks best. Kairoff said that choosing one setting was often a decent compromise. “Nothing will look as good as it could,” he said, “but nothing will look as bad as it might.”<br /><br />Checking for high definition <br /><br />Don’t overlook the Aspect setting. Televisions commonly get shipped set to “overscan” or “zoom,” which enlarges the picture and can cut off the edges. The overscan feature is meant to hide errors that sometimes show up in broadcasts as a flickering white line on the edge of a full-screen picture. When you overscan, you reduce the number of lines of resolution and degrade your picture.<br /><br />Instead, set the TV to Full. “If you do not do this, you are not getting high definition,” said Joel Silver, founder of the Imaging Science Foundation, which trains professionals to calibrate TVs. “You could be losing 30 percent or more of your resolution.”<br /><br />You have to check the settings on your cable or satellite box and DVD player as well. “The dirtiest little secret is the people who are paying for HD and are getting 480P,” Silver said. “Thirty percent of the homes we see are watching standard definition. It’s a scandal.”<br /><br />Better cables <br /><br />Sometimes changing a cable can make a big improvement, but only if the cable you have is really bad. As it happens, the cheap cables that come with TVs are often really bad.<br />In lengths of three feet or less, all you need is a cable that fits snugly in the HDMI slot. But with longer cables, like those over 10 feet, quality becomes important, said Silver.<br /><br /> He said the best cable was called an active cable, which has an amplifier in it. Those don’t have to be expensive. The website Monoprice sells Redmere technology cables in a 10-foot length for $17.43 (Rs 1,097). (Fancy versions are more than $60 or Rs 3,778.)<br /><br />Advanced settings <br /><br />If you are even more adventurous, you can delve into custom settings. You can improve individual adjustments like Colour Temperature, Brightness, Tint and Motion Smoother by trial and error, or you can save time by looking at what other people with your model of TV have done. <br /><br />People will post how they have set their TVs on audiovisual forums like avsforum or CNET. Miller, who calibrates TVs professionally, maintains a website called TweakTV, where he publishes a simplified version of the best settings for each model of TV he has worked on.<br /><br />One word of warning: The THX setting limits how much you can adjust the set. If you want to customise more heavily, you’ll have to switch to Cinema or something else.<br /></p>
<p>If you are close to spending thousands of dollars on a TV because you want a better picture, you may want to save your money. You can almost certainly make your TV’s picture look better than it did when the set was brand-new, and doing so is relatively easy.<br /><br /></p>.<p>Virtually every mass-produced TV is set by default to stand out in a store display. That means TVs come out of the box with the picture set to be bright, with overly saturated colours and digital sharpening. Kevin Miller, a consultant to several TV manufacturers, calls it the “Best Buy Torch Mode.”<br /><br />The manufacturers, Miller said, do not know “if their set is going to be on a wall with 45 other TVs in a Best Buy or a consumer’s home.”<br /><br />In your darkened living room, though, that bright screen is painful to watch. But the bright screen and many other TV ills can be fixed for nothing by changing a few settings. You can improve your TV’s picture even more if you are willing to spend a few dollars for test discs, or make it nearly perfect by hiring a professional to calibrate your set.<br /><br />Basic settings <br /><br />The most obvious fix is to turn off Torch Mode. That may require doing something many people loathe - consult the owner’s manual. But it could come in handy.<br /><br />Then find your TV’s menus. Look for an option named something like “screen settings” or “modes” (manufacturers use different names).<br /><br />Under screen settings, you should see options like Vivid, Games, Sports and Cinema. The truest picture generally comes from the setting with a name like Movie, Cinema or Theatre. Those settings give the picture a more film-like appearance. The THX setting usually gets you closest to movie-theatre style.<br /><br />If you want to go a step further, you can change the modes to suit what you are watching at the time. “Put it in Sports mode when you watch sports, Game mode when you play games,” said Josh Kairoff, who was the director of display engineering for Pioneer. “If you watch sports in Movie mode, it isn’t going to look that good.”<br /><br />If you don’t want to constantly change settings, stick with the one for the kind of viewing you do most often, and test the picture at the time of day you watch most often. Room light makes a big difference in which looks best. Kairoff said that choosing one setting was often a decent compromise. “Nothing will look as good as it could,” he said, “but nothing will look as bad as it might.”<br /><br />Checking for high definition <br /><br />Don’t overlook the Aspect setting. Televisions commonly get shipped set to “overscan” or “zoom,” which enlarges the picture and can cut off the edges. The overscan feature is meant to hide errors that sometimes show up in broadcasts as a flickering white line on the edge of a full-screen picture. When you overscan, you reduce the number of lines of resolution and degrade your picture.<br /><br />Instead, set the TV to Full. “If you do not do this, you are not getting high definition,” said Joel Silver, founder of the Imaging Science Foundation, which trains professionals to calibrate TVs. “You could be losing 30 percent or more of your resolution.”<br /><br />You have to check the settings on your cable or satellite box and DVD player as well. “The dirtiest little secret is the people who are paying for HD and are getting 480P,” Silver said. “Thirty percent of the homes we see are watching standard definition. It’s a scandal.”<br /><br />Better cables <br /><br />Sometimes changing a cable can make a big improvement, but only if the cable you have is really bad. As it happens, the cheap cables that come with TVs are often really bad.<br />In lengths of three feet or less, all you need is a cable that fits snugly in the HDMI slot. But with longer cables, like those over 10 feet, quality becomes important, said Silver.<br /><br /> He said the best cable was called an active cable, which has an amplifier in it. Those don’t have to be expensive. The website Monoprice sells Redmere technology cables in a 10-foot length for $17.43 (Rs 1,097). (Fancy versions are more than $60 or Rs 3,778.)<br /><br />Advanced settings <br /><br />If you are even more adventurous, you can delve into custom settings. You can improve individual adjustments like Colour Temperature, Brightness, Tint and Motion Smoother by trial and error, or you can save time by looking at what other people with your model of TV have done. <br /><br />People will post how they have set their TVs on audiovisual forums like avsforum or CNET. Miller, who calibrates TVs professionally, maintains a website called TweakTV, where he publishes a simplified version of the best settings for each model of TV he has worked on.<br /><br />One word of warning: The THX setting limits how much you can adjust the set. If you want to customise more heavily, you’ll have to switch to Cinema or something else.<br /></p>
