How to set up your TV

This brief guide will take you through the process of tackling the adjustments to brightness, colour contrast, sharpness and motion processing on your television to ensure you get the best possible picture.

Seeing the pattern

At What Hi-fi?, we use test patterns from a THX Optimizer disc. You can find THX’S calibrator in the extras of some Thx-certified DVDS (Star Wars, Pixar films). Alternatively, THX has a free app for Android and IOS.

A good place to start is with the handful of preset TV modes. We tend to start with the’ standard’ or ‘user’ settings and calibrate from there.

Contrast is another word for white level. A good way to test this is by using a scene with clouds. Turn the contrast right up to the top and notch it down until you start to see the detail rather than a solid patch of white.

Setting the brightness

Brightness tweaks the black levels. Turn it right up so the black bars above and below a film look grey. Then nudge the level down until they look black again. Focus on something dark – a jacket or shirt – and go as low as possible until you start to lose the detail in the creases.

For colour, choose a colourful scene and see if the various hues look bright enough. Push the colour control up a little if you think they could have a touch more punch. Next, bring up a scene with human faces to see if skin tones look realistic.

Adding sharpness has its place but it can leave an image looking unnatural. To get the balance right, take an image with a strong edge and focus on that as you nudge the sharpness up from zero. At some point, you’ll notice the outline will start to look unnatural and oversharpened, with a sort of halo around it – this is the indication that you’ve gone a touch too far.

Achieving clarity

For more on how to set up your TV, head to our website (whathifi.com) where there’s in-depth information on everything you need to do. When it comes to features such as noise reduction, edge enhancement and motion handling, our advice is to turn them off to start with and add in incremental steps as looks necessary. Use a test scene with as much full-screen movement as possible (eg a panning shot).