How To Make ANY TV Look Better! TV Settings for Best Picture Quality

it's that time of year again where many of you are thinking about upgrading your television or maybe you've gone ahead and done it already by treating yourself to a new tv this holiday season we have reviewed a number of tvs on this channel this year and whether they have been budget or cost no object there are just a few universal things that you can do to make sure that you are getting the most accurate picture straight out of the box so go ahead hit that like button subscribe if you're not already because today we are going over how to make any tv look better [Music] a lot of you have questions about calibration for example when to pop for professional calibration or is cheap calibration worth it or can you do it yourself the truth is you're all just looking for ways to improve your picture and that's what this video is all about but i need to stress one thing before we get started you cannot calibrate a tv by eye or using a disk like digital video essentials doing anything by eye or using a disk is a video adjustment not calibration so when are you a candidate for professional calibration well the first thing you need to know is that calibration often involves some very expensive tools and software or it requires you to hire a professional to come in and do it for you so in my opinion if you have made a substantial investment in your home theater maybe you have a dedicated home theater somewhere in your home you are likely a candidate for professional calibration or at the very least you should invest in the tools to do it yourself on this channel we measure every single television using the calman software and a calibrated meter and we're going to link to all of it down in the description below if you want to check it out for yourself but i need to warn you these tools are very expensive in fact they can often cost more than the tvs we are calibrating but since a lot of people don't go to these lengths we use these tools in order to give you the most accurate review possible and well to sort of help you be a guide on what settings you may be able to use with your tv to get the most accurate picture straight out of the box regardless of your tvs make or model most tvs ship from the factory in one of three picture profiles and those profiles are standard eco or vivid slash dynamic depending on the make and model it can be called either one a lot of tvs nowadays are being shipped in an eco-friendly mode and the reason for this is that that mode requires the least amount of power which can be a good thing standard and dynamic are often chosen because typically they are the brightest of the two profiles in terms of light output and who doesn't love a bright tv but the problem with these profiles is while bright they're not the most accurate they are very contrasty but their colors tend to skew cool or more blue why well because our brains see brightness and the color blue as a mark of quality also because in a store environment where you have a whole wall of tvs the tv that is brightest and most blue often wins and so these profiles are chosen by the manufacturer on purpose so that upon unboxing them in your own home you are treated to an experience not unlike what you may have gotten in the retail store and this is why i always advocate that you change your television out of its stock picture profile as soon as you take it out of the box and the profiles you're going to want to keep an eye out for our movie cinema theater custom isf isf day if you've got it because out of all of the tvs that we reviewed this year we achieved and measured more accurate results by simply changing to one of these more movie centric profiles and this was true across the board except with one exception the tcl 6-series for whatever reason that tv measured better in its standard picture profile with only a minor adjustment needed to its color temperature so what happens when you change your television into one of these more movie centric picture profiles well you're probably going to notice one of two things if not both right off the bat the first is that your picture may get a little bit dimmer in terms of light output and the second the color balance or whites of the picture may get warmer or they may even seem yellow by comparison and this this warmer shift is a perfect example of why you cannot calibrate your tv by eye because your eye is going to see that shift and try and tell your brain that something is wrong when it's not and in fact i would encourage you to leave this setting in place and maybe even leave the room entirely for several minutes and then come back because this is going to make that color shift a little bit less dramatic and it will well keep you focused on what it looks like now rather than stress over how it may appear wrong to your brain it's not in almost every single tv we reviewed this year simply changing the picture profile from whatever the factory said as standard to a movie centric profile got us 85 to 90 percent of the way to calibrate it straight out of the box no no additional anything required after that in only a handful of cases did we have to take things a little bit further by going into the advanced picture menus finding color temperature or color balance and switching it from say warm one to warm two or standard to warm one doing that you were pretty much set in fact everything else has to do with turning on or off features rather than adjusting the image itself now let's talk about light output because since the advent of hdr light output has become a very big deal with televisions and that's because well your tv needs to be fairly bright in order to properly showcase hdr content and its high dynamic range which is what hdr stands for and it also means that it has to have finer control over its backlighting and this is where local dimming zones come in without getting too technical hdr content has a greater range between light and dark and in some instances well hdr content is dictating the amount of light needed based on the image that it is displaying on screen so rather than turn all of your backlighting on full some of the backlights or zones get dimmed down while others get maxed out and this is essentially what local dimming is doing and when done properly you should be treated to a very vibrant punchy contrasty image not only with respect to differences between light and dark but also in color that is what hdr is all about compared to you know non-hdr now there are multiple forms of hdr there's hdr there's hdr10 there's hdr 10 plus hlg dolby vision and all of these different formats or flavors have kind of their own rules and standards the point is is that when your tv senses one of these signals it's going to change its picture profile into something that it thinks is going to look best and this is often going to be say hdr standard or hdr bright or dolby vision bright and it's going to look different than the movie centric profiles we spoke about earlier if you want your hdr picture profile to look more like say movie or cinema for non-hdr content simply choose one of the hdr movie cinema or theater modes that may be available on your tv and the two different types of content hdr and non-hdr should look very similar one thing to keep in mind if your tv isn't very bright to begin with you may not be as wowed by hdr content as some people in this instance you may want to actually change your hdr picture profile back to standard or bright or vivid in order to get the absolute most light output when watching hdr content even though i told you don't do that but if even doing that you're still not bowled over by hdr it doesn't seem very bright then the problem is likely your television in which case you might be in the market for a new tv now let's talk about motion a lot of modern tvs nowadays have some type of motion interpolation or smooth motion technology because well manufacturers in their infinite wisdom think that we want this sort of a thing and it's even been given a name the soap opera effect and what is causing this effect is that your television is essentially duplicating frames or creating new frames out of thin air that didn't originally exist in the signal and with these more frames your brain doesn't have to interpret the gaps between images and well see that as motion the problem with this is is that we've all grown up on a pretty steady diet of 24 and 30 frames per second content so the presence of more frames actually appears unnatural and to turn this off you're going to want to go into your tv's advanced picture menu and look for things like motion interpolation smooth motion or true motion every every tv manufacturer calls it something different but these are some of the buzzwords to look for find this function and turn it off this is legit like the second thing i do to every tv that we review apart from changing it into one of its more movie-centric picture profiles first speaking of turning things off there are two more functions that i would like you to disable and the first is any eco or energy saving functionality as well as an ambient light sensor now these are typically found in your picture menu but sometimes they are located in the backlighting sub menu but you're going to want to turn these off as they adjust the brightness of your tv up and down as well the lighting changes in your room and you just don't want your picture suddenly becoming brighter every time a cloud passes overhead but you also don't want it becoming dimmer if someone gets up turns on the kitchen lights to get a glass of water so for best results you're going to want to turn both of these functions off next let's talk about local dimming local dimming refers to the severity with which your lcd's led backlighting system will brighten or dim or turn off altogether based on the content being displayed on screen and local dimming is very important as it is likely the setting that is going to get you the most dark rich inky blacks like what you're going to find with oled now you can turn local dimming off i don't recommend that you do this but you can but you may find that the image is going to appear a bit washed out and lacking contrast if you do for most displays setting local dimming to low or medium will produce the best results and i found this to be true with sony's samsung's high sense pretty much everybody but lg for lg i recommend medium now one of the things to note is that when you're viewing hdr content hdr content will typically reset local dimming to high and it is my recommendation that you keep it there with one exception lg with lg and hdr content you may want to experiment with setting the local dimming back down to medium as well there are just two more picture profiles that i want to go over before we wrap things up and the first is a game mode now some of you may think that game mode is for watching sports it's not it's meant for video game consoles like the playstation and xbox and the good thing is is that simply connecting one of these devices to most modern tvs will set that tv off in game mode and game mode oftentimes features better response time and smoother motion two things that you really want for gaming one of the bad things about game mode is that they typically go back to like a standard color profile so they tend to be a little bit cooler a little bit sharper in that regard now you can go into your picture menus and change the color temperature to warm warm one or warm two to get rid of this blue skew without altering any of the benefits of game mode the other picture profile that some newer tvs have is filmmaker mode i love filmmaker mode and it has been created largely to take some of the guesswork out of setting up your television as it it gets you closer to the creator's intent at the push of a button filmmaker mode in our tests usually measures very well not to mention it has motion interpolation automatically turned off and it sets backlighting or local dimming to an appropriate level to look as good as possible with the widest range of content so i advocate for filmmaker mode and if your tv has it i think that you should use it especially if you value image accuracy just know that more often than not filmmaker mode may appear a little bit dimmer even compared to profiles such as cinema or movie but this this is by design because filmmaker mode is trying to balance all of the various settings to give you the most accurate picture straight away and this this can be a very good thing do you need filmmaker mode to enjoy movies or television no but it can be an awesome feature to rely on especially if you don't want to fuss with settings and i know this has been a lot of information so to recap here are the five basic steps that you can do to any television to make it more accurate out of the box number one change your television's picture profile to movie cinema theater custom or isf number two change your tv's color temperature from standard or cool to warm or warm one number three turn off any ambient light sensors or energy saving settings number four turn off smooth motion motion interpolation or true motion functionality and number five set your local dimming to low or medium for richer blacks in non-oled like displays or if you have filmmaker mode you can just set it to that and go about your day so that really is the basics now before i sign off we did get a couple of viewer questions that we weren't able to work into the script but i want to answer them before we get out of here so if you'll permit me i have them written down and the first one was should you enable or disable auto contrast and noise reduction this is a little bit more of a personal taste thing is it doesn't have that big of an impact necessarily on image fidelity it can improve low level black detail and things like that but honestly i typically turn these things off or i leave them in a low setting but if you like a little extra sharpness a little extra edge enhancement then these are ways to get that done it can make an image feel a little bit more three-dimensional hopefully not in an artificial way so i'm gonna say that one's a little bit more for personal taste i typically leave them on low or i disable them next question set the sharpness to zero yes or no i used to do this however every television is a little bit different yes some televisions default a sharpness to say 10 and in their particular tvs this could actually be their baseline they're zero so i typically i typically leave the sharpness wherever the television sets it by default unless unless i am noticing like jagged lines around sharp verticals or like edge artifacts that kind of stair steppy kind of thing then i'll go in and i will adjust sharpness until maybe those go away and then that's where i stop but for the most part tvs have gotten pretty good about how to set sharpness so i tend to leave it wherever it sets by default based on the picture profile number three reconcile different settings for different components okay this one's interesting because what the person is asking is where do you start and stop calibrating and if you have multiple components in a home theater system should you not calibrate your display as well as say your blu-ray player your your dvd player your vcr whatever that may be your receiver and the answer is technically you should calibrate all of them to work together to the same standard this can be very difficult and this is an instance where i would say that you are definitely a candidate for professional calibration because a professional knows best how to balance all of these different parameters to work together but yeah you're not wrong if you want the absolute just best image fidelity you are going to have to make calibration or adjustments to everything in your signal chain as it relates to video but i would let a professional do this before tackling it you know say myself especially if i didn't have any experience with calibration and lastly arc or optical connections how to a lot of you guys even though i asked for video questions a lot of you guys had questions about arc or how to get audio from the television to your system arc stands for audio return channel and earc is enhanced audio return channel now this is a really cool thing it really is and i don't want to go into great detail the way to get arc from your tv to your receiver and vice versa simply connect a compatible hdmi cable to the input output on your television labeled arc or earc then connect it to your receiver or blu-ray player whatever monitor output which will also probably say arc erc just make sure that you're kind of doing that one-to-one connection then inside your televisions sound menus select a r c now usually just selecting this will create all of the defaults that you need in order to hear sound but sometimes you may have to go to digital sound setting in which case you'll have an option of auto through or pcm if you're using an hdmi connection usually you can get away with auto or pass-through i would start there and you'll know if you're doing it right because you'll hear sound and if you have a receiver you're going to see things like dolby atmos appear on the display of your receiver uh when streaming movies or television from say your television down to your receiver um if you have e-a-r-c that is otherwise you're gonna see things like dolby or dolby digital plus stuff like that but that's that's how you do it that's how you do it now if you have an older component or something like that you may have to use the optical audio output of your television in which case you can take an optical cable out of the digital audio out of your television into say a dac or a preamp that has a dac built in but you're going to want to go back into your sound settings and set your digital audio output not to auto but pcm that is important if you leave it in auto there's a very good chance that you're going to hear a very distorted sound it's going to sound like maybe like a garbage disposal that's bad switch it to pcm you should hear audio just fine but that is that's how you connect things using arc earc and hdmi cables or optical cables to say a dac so that's it that is our video of the five things that you can do to make any tv better straight out of the box and we would like to thank you all for submitting your questions we tried to tailor this script as best we could to answer as many as we could but if there is a question that you have as it relates to video that we did not answer go ahead and leave it down in the comments below and i will try and get to it personally but my question of the day for you guys is this after watching this video do you think that you are a candidate for professional calibration is this something you want to invest in or are you going to leave well enough alone and go with just the five basic things that you can do to make your television better let us know down in the comments below if you like this video please do give it a thumbs up like and subscribe ring that bell so that you're notified when new videos come out um we are still raising money for feeding america we are running up against the deadline but there is still time that you can give now and help someone have a meal this christmas click donate somewhere on your screen and know that 100 of your donation goes to feeding america and helping those get a meal and so far you guys have helped us to raise well over four thousand dollars in a little bit over a month so let's keep it going right up until christmas shall we maybe we can get to five thousand dollars if you use any of the links that christy left for you down below know that that is a great way that you guys have shown your support for this channel and the work that we do here in both christie and i thank you very much also also if you haven't been watching some of our television reviews we are going to link to every tv that we reviewed this year so you can get caught up and maybe find a tv that might be right for you and your family follow me on instagram at recovering audiophile and that is it i am done and out of here today the light is just changing and it's driving me bananas so remember the only person that has to like the sight and sound of your system is you you should still do the five things but honestly it's whatever you want to do it's your tv so so enjoy enjoy the music enjoy what you're watching thank you so much for watching and we will see you on the next video bye

Channel: Andrew Robinson

Views: 1,153,279

Keywords: how to make any tv look better, best tv settings, picture quality, tv settings for best picture quality, best tv picture settings for samsung, best tv picture settings for sony, do new tvs need calibrating, how to improve my tv picture, best picture settings, best picture settings for lg tv, how to make your tv look better, tv settings for best picture, calibrate any tv, best picture settings for led tv, tv calibration settings, is tv calibration worth it, tv calibration

Id: 9VXsmoj17II

Length: 22min 37sec (1357 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 20 2020