Gadgetory

when you get your new TV out of the box it probably won't look quite right in your living room fixing that can be as simple as using a calibration setup disc or as expensive as paying someone to do it right now will do neither instead I'll show you how to set up your TV by eye so that you can quickly tune it up at home without anyone's help start with contrast for this one you'll want to find footage with lots of bright areas like this scene by the ocean contrast controls the intensity of the brightness for the lightest areas of a picture that might sound confusing but as I adjust it you'll see what I mean turn it up until you start losing details in the brighter areas like the sky here or the sand then turn it down until you start seeing that detail again the correct studying is within a few notches of that point next up brightness for this step find a dark scene like one from an action movie contrary to what you might have heard brightness adjusts the intensity of the black levels so a TV that's too bright will make blacks look washed out or even grayish turn down the brightness until everything appears way too dark then turn it back up to the point where things in the scene that are supposed to be black are at the blackest level your TV will allow this is the hardest setting to adjust by eye so be patient and adjust the brightness as you switch between different types of programming color not to be confused with color temperature is usually a OK right out of the box usually that means right in the middle of the scale if you do want to adjust the color find out well at scene featuring a person's face to better understand the color setting think of it as saturation if you were to bring it all the way down the image would start to look grayish find the level where their flesh looks natural without being too orange there are two more important settings to adjust here let's look at sharpness for this one almost any image will do so let's stick with ROS here this sweet spot for sharpness is somewhere near the body of the scale it should be low but not so low that things like wrinkles on faces disappear you'll know it's set to high if there's high lighting around the edges of objects like her face find the level just above the point where details begin to disappear finally color temperature again use the scene where you can clearly see a face like this the funny thing about color temperature is that to a certain extent no matter how it's set it'll look correct to you so be careful with this one on our TV we have color tone presets instead of color temperature but it's the same idea right now it's set to cool but the color temperature is way too blue which is causing this blue tint on her face turn it up to high and her face will be too warm pick one that feels right to you if your TV has a setting like white balance you can have much more control over color temperature but that's almost impossible to adjust by eye once you've gone through these settings you should find yourself watching a much more accurate picture and while an expert might not call it perfect all that really matters is that the picture looks good to you for the full written guide visit how-to cnet.com and if you want to chat about it hit me up on twitter first seen it I'm Sharon Vaknin