Super Bowl LII is just around the corner; is your TV ready?
Your buddies are set to come over to watch the big game. You’ve bought the snacks and beer and busted out a few folding chairs to accommodate the crowd.
But don’t forget the one thing your guests will be staring at for four hours: the big-screen television.
To ensure the action is smooth and the colors are just right, here are a few simple tips and tricks to optimize the picture (and sound) of your existing TV. Source content: While it might seem obvious, ensure your main TV source — such as your cable or satellite box — is the best your provider has to offer (or rather, the best you can afford). If it’s a couple of years old, make sure it’s at least an HD receiver, but a 4K box is even better, providing you have a 4K TV, which delivers four times the resolution of an HDTV.
Even better, if you’re set up with an antenna for an OTA (“over-the-air”) signal, the game likely will look better than what your cable company can deliver — and it’s free, too.
NBC hasn’t confirmed it will be broadcasting Super Bowl LII in 4K Ultra HD. Still, a 4K TV can upconvert an HD signal to near 4K quality. Use a newer HDMI cable to handle your audio
and video: If you’re streaming the game online, be sure to have a fast Internet connection for smooth and stutter-free picture and sound.
Tweak your levels: Many TVs are programmed out of the box to be shown in a store, often with high brightness to capture attention, and this might not look so good in your home.
“Instead, you’ll get better picture fidelity at lower brightness levels so details won’t be washed out,” says Paul Gagnon, executive director and analyst at IHS Markit, a global market research firm. “You notice a lot more detail with lower brightness, so drop it down to see what looks good to you.”
When setting up a new TV, you might be asked if it’s to be used in a store or a home, and it should optimize the picture accordingly.
Color and saturation levels might also be off on your new TV, adds David Davis, one of two brothers who owns Davis Audio & Video, a custom installer in Chicago. “Most people aren’t going to use test pattern discs to calibrate their TV, but because many new televisions are set to have super saturated colors and high brightness to capture people’s eyes in a store, play with the settings to make everything look more natural — like you’re really at the game.”
And if it looks worse, revert it back to factory settings on the menu screen, he says.
While not every audio-video enthusiast will agree, a tip to vastly improving picture quality of your TV is to turn up the contrast almost to full and reduce the brightness down to below half. This little-known trick makes blacks blacker, colors richer and gets rid of the washed-out look some entry-level TVs have.
Motion matters: You might also need to tweak the motion settings of your television, whether you need to speed it up or slow it down. Say what?
On speeding it up, fast-paced motion was harder to handle for some older LCD TVs — as a team’s running back might look blurry as he sprints down the field — and so television manufacturers started to double, triple or even quadruple the typical 60frames-per-second picture. That’s why you see 60Hz (“Hertz”), 120Hz and 240Hz TVs advertised.
“Generally speaking, sports look best in higher refresh rates, so if your TV has the ability to upconvert to a higher refresh rate, enable it,” Gagnon suggests. “Depending on your TV, it may be called frame rate, motion rate or hertz.”
Some TVs let you enable a feature called “motion smoothing” or “motion interpolation,” so experiment with that, too. If it has a Sports mode, go for that. But sometimes the faster the Hertz, the more motion sickness some people feel. “If you’re not used to this, your guests may not like it if the refresh rate is too high, so you can turn that down,” Davis said.
Audio, too: Remember this: The thinner TVs are getting, the worse the audio tends to be.
After all, how good do you think sound will be coming out of a pancake-shaped speaker?
If you don’t have the budget, space or technical know-how to set up a surround sound system for your home theater at least consider one of the newer sound bars to add some boom to your room.