All you need to know to get the best viewing experience
Want to get the best out of your new telly? Of course you do. Follow these simple guidelines and you should succeed
Whether you’re still figuring out the right TV for you or you’ve already made your choice from the best screens on the market, getting the best TV picture requires you to take some care when it comes to set-up.
The basics of good TV set-up
Setting up your TV is best done when you first install it – not least getting the position and viewing distance right – but the finer adjustments to the picture can be done at any time, and can make the world of difference compared with the out-of-the-box settings.
Our guide will take you through the process, from positioning your TV and sorting the optimum seating position to tackling the all-important adjustments to brightness, contrast, motion processing and more – all of which will ensure you get the best possible picture.
Where should you position your TV?
Putting your TV in the right position (and not just next to the nearest plug socket) is one of the easiest things you can do to make sure it looks its best.
For a start, you’ll want to make sure as many seating positions as possible are viewing the screen straight on. From an angle, colours and black levels can start to look washed out. A pivoting TV stand can help with this if the size or shape of your room makes it tricky.
You’ll also want to consider reflections – most windows will have curtains or blinds you can close and, of course, lights can be switched off.
For ambient lighting that won’t cause a distraction, consider placing lamps or lighting behind your TV. This approach is also known as ‘bias lighting’.
What about viewing angle and viewing distance?
The screen should be at eye level when you’re seated, so invest in a decent TV stand that can accommodate any other kit you have, such as a cable box, Blu-ray player or soundbar.
Don’t forget this rule still stands if you choose to wall-mount your TV. Avoid the trend of placing it above a fireplace if you can, or the extra height could mean it will be like sitting in the first row of the cinema. If you must place it higher, make sure you angle it downwards to make viewing more comfortable. Recommendations vary on how far away from your TV you should sit, but a rough guideline is between 1.5 and 2x the diagonal size of the screen. Ultimately though, it comes down to what works best for you (see below).
How to connect your sources
It’s time to think about what you’ll be hooking up to your TV. Some people will use an AV receiver and plug all their sources into that, while others may connect directly to the TV itself.
However you decide to do it, the best and simplest way to connect to each source is via an HDMI lead. This will ensure you’re getting the best picture from HD and 4K sources, and can carry both audio and video using one cable.
Soundbars might be slightly different – many affordable options connect to a TV using an optical connection. It’s worth checking with your particular model and making sure your telly has an optical socket.
If the soundbar does use HDMI, you’ll want to make sure you use the input marked ‘ARC’ (Audio Return Channel) for this connection. This allows your TV to
“Finer adjustments to the picture can be done at any time, and can make the world of difference compared with the out-of-the-box settings”
pass all the audio from connected sources through to the soundbar. This is also the case with AV receivers, for passing the sound from smart TV apps back to the receiver to be amplified.
If you’ve bought a 4K TV, keep an eye out for HDCP 2.2, which might be labelled on one or several of your TV’S HDMI inputs. This is copy-protection technology that has been built into 4K-capable devices, and you’ll need to use these dedicated inputs for connecting any 4K sources, such as 4K Blu-ray players or 4K-enabled receivers.
Look out for HDR support as well. If you have a 4K HDR TV, don’t take it for granted that all the HDMI connections will support an HDR feed. Some TVS, such as the Sony KD65ZD9BU, offer HDR compatibility only via two of their four HDMI inputs. Make sure you connect your 4K disc player to the correct HDMI input to get the full benefits of a 4K HDR picture.
As for channels, if you’re hooking up a satellite or cable box via HDMI, the set-up will take care of itself.
However, if you’re using your TV’S built-in Freeview or Freesat tuner, connect your aerial or satellite cable then
scan for channels in the channel tuning menu – the auto-scan option will usually do the trick.
What about connecting to the internet?
With most televisions now featuring smart apps of some kind, you’ll want to make sure you get your TV on to your home network in order to access all of its functionality. Most TVS will walk you through this in the network area of the settings menu.
For a more stable connection, especially when streaming video, you can usually hardwire via ethernet instead of relying on wi-fi.
How to adjust your TV’S picture settings
To make sure you’re getting the best performance from your new set, you may want to play around with your TV’S picture settings.
Chances are your TV will be set to the factory default settings, which are likely to be bright and overdriven to make the screen stand out on the shop floor. But with just a few tweaks, you’ll be able to get the most out of it for use at home.
The only thing to remember is that whatever tweaks you make to the picture will usually apply only to the selected HDMI input.
Some manufacturers offer an option to apply your settings across all inputs, but you might find it beneficial to program inputs individually so you can make specific tweaks for certain sources. Some people even have different settings for day and night.
Should you use a THX Optimizer disc?
Here at What Hi-fi?, we use test patterns to set up TVS for reviewing and a THX Optimizer disc can be very useful. You can find THX’S calibrator in the extras on some Thx-certified DVDS (although annoyingly, hardly any Blu-rays) such as
Star Wars, Pirates Of The Caribbean and several Pixar movies. Alternatively, THX has a free app for Android and IOS.
THX set-up is pretty straightforward, but it’s still worth familiarising yourself with the main settings, as outlined below. Remember, if you want to start from scratch, look for the ‘restore factory settings’ option in the settings menu.
What about the TV’S preset picture modes?
Most TVS offer a handful of preset modes, which are usually a good place to start. These vary depending on your TV’S make and model, but tend to be labelled ‘cool’, ‘warm’, ‘standard’, ‘dynamic’ or similar.
A good way to test this is with a scene incorporating clouds – turn the contrast right up to the top and notch it down until you start to see detail rather than a solid patch of white.
With LCD screens, you should be able to go quite high here, even as far as 8090 per cent. Starting at around 65 per cent should give you a marker, but if you’ve got your hands on a plasma screen, this will likely need to be a touch lower to avoid screen burn.
What about brightness, backlight and colour?
Brightness
Despite what its name might suggest, this control will actually tweak the black levels of your TV. We want the blacks in an image to be as deep as they can be without losing shadow detail. To achieve this, turn the brightness right up so the black bars above and below your movie look grey, and then nudge the level down until they look black again. Focus on something dark, such as a jacket or shirt, and keep going as low as possible until you start to lose the detail in the creases. Choose the level before that detail started to disappear, usually somewhere around 50 per cent.
Backlight
This setting controls the overall brightness of your TV’S picture (in LCD sets only – plasmas do not have backlighting), allowing you to adjust it for different viewing environments.
You might do this between day and night, turning it down a little in a darkened room to help prevent eye fatigue. But this setting is purely down to personal preference and environment – best to start half way and play around to see where suits.
Colour
You might not need to do much to the colour controls as the TV mode you choose will often tweak this for you automatically, with the slider usually sitting around midway.
Put on a colourful scene and see if colours look bright enough, pushing the 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 – this can be the trickiest thing to balance, so spend some time making sure everything looks natural.
If you can’t strike a happy balance between vibrancy and realism, changing the tint and/or hue settings might help, but we often find they’re best left at the factory settings (usually 0 or midway).
How sharp should your picture be?
Adding sharpness to an image might sound like a good thing, but it can leave an image looking unnatural and rob it of subtle detail. For the most part, we suggest keeping this setting low, usually no higher than 30 per cent.
To test this, take an image with a strong edge and focus on that as you nudge up the sharpness from zero. At some point, you’ll notice the outline
“Adding sharpness to an image might sound like a good thing, but it can leave an image looking unnatural and rob it of subtle detail”
start to look unnatural and oversharpened, with a sort of halo appearing around it. When this happens, knock the slider back down until it disappears.
Going hand in hand with sharpness is overscanning, a process that dates back before the days of HD, when broadcasters used to hide non-picture data at the edge of the TV image. You’ll need to make sure this is turned off in order to get the full picture.
Look in the menu settings for anything to do with aspect ratio, and make sure the screen is set to ‘full’, ‘1:1’ or a similarly worded setting.
What about processing modes?
Now we’ve covered the main picturesetting categories, it’s time to talk about picture processing. Most manufacturers will fill their settings menus with a whole host of processing options, which can not only be confusing but can also often make the picture worse.
That’s not to say they’re all write-offs, though. There have definitely been improvements in picture processing over recent years but you’ll still rarely gain something worthwhile in one area without losing out in another – it’s a careful balancing act.
As a rule of thumb, we suggest you start with all processing turned off, adjust your picture settings and go from there. You can then test out any options from a good starting point, making sure you begin on the lowest setting available on each option before pushing it up.
Here are some of the most popular processing options to look out for, with a description of what they do.
Black and white enhancers
For the most part, the best thing you can do for strong black-and-white levels on your TV is to adjust your contrast and brightness settings properly.
Any added processing to make blacks blacker or whites whiter generally does more harm than good, and will often lose a lot of detail in the process.
Depending on the brand, a low setting on either might be worth a look, but we’d lean towards keeping them off entirely.
Dynamic contrast
This setting will adapt brightness depending on what is showing on the screen – so during a darker scene, it will go dimmer to hit deeper blacks, and then bump up the brightness for a light scene.
We’d advise switching this off; it’s not always reliable and can cause flickering and brightness jumps in scenes with both bright and dark elements.
Noise reduction and edge enhancement
Noise reduction, or anything of a similar name, will often soften a good HD image too much, taking away detail in an attempt to make an image less noisy. The same goes in reverse for edge or detail enhancement, which will usually increase noise in a picture by trying to boost definition. The only time you might find these settings useful is when watching non-hd broadcast TV, otherwise we’d make sure they stay firmly in the ‘off’ position.
Motion handling
This is one of the biggest options when it comes to TV processing but, despite decent improvements, you’re still ultimately gaining a smoother moving object for a less stable overall image.
Depending on the manufacturer, this is known as Trumotion (LG), Motionflow (Sony) or Motion Plus (Samsung). It works by scanning the image and inserting repeated or blank frames into the video sequence to prevent a jerky end result.
Aggressive motion handling often results in a distracting blurry halo around a moving object. In movies, it can give a rather unrealistic sheen called the ‘soap-opera effect’, where Hollywood blockbusters shot at 24fps (frames per second) take on the look and feel of an
Eastenders episode shot at 60fps. For this reason, we’d recommend setting motion handling to off or low for movies, although sports fans might take the smoother image over the picture artefacts it introduces. This is down to personal preference, so it’s worth playing around with.
Better results can often be achieved when motion controls are separated out into blur and judder controls. If your TV offers this, we’d suggest you turn judder off and tweak the blur controls to suit.
Sit back and enjoy
Now your TV is set up, all that remains is for you to feed it the best source material you can, then just sit back and enjoy it.
“There have been improvements in processing in recent years but you’ll still rarely gain something in one area without losing out in another”