How to Get the Best Picture Quality from Your HDTV
https://www.howtogeek.com/299838/how-to-get-the-best-picture-quality-from-your-hdtv/Feel like you aren’t getting the best picture from your shiny new TV? Want to make sure you’re watching movies as they were intended to be seen? Here’s what you need to know about HDTV picture quality, and how to adjust your set for the best image.
Most TVs are not designed to have the best picture quality out-of-the-box. Instead, they’re designed to be eye-catching in the showroom, next to other TVs under fluorescent lights. That means their backlight is as bright as possible, contrast is set so the image “pops”, sharpness is turned up way too high, and motion is ultra smooth.
However, most of these features are not ideal for your living room. Colors that “pop” are usually ugly and un-lifelike, and can remove detail from the image. Those overly bright whites actually have a blue tint, which is inaccurate and can strain your eyes when you’re watching in the dark. Furthermore, extra sharpening and smoothing features are usually just marketing gimmicks, and actually add artifacts to your image, rather than making them look better.
For a long time, TVs used to come with these “vivid” settings out of the box, which is terrible for at-home viewing. If you have a TV that’s more than a couple years old, you may still be using those awful settings. These days, things are a little better, since most TVs will ask you to put them in “Home” or “Store Demo” mode when you set them up. But even the out-of-the-box “Home” settings are less than ideal, even if they’re not quite as bad as the old “vivid” settings were.
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... but I didn't remember what I did, or why.
My wife bought the TV when she gave our old CRT TV to her brother after his own television stopped working.
I just reviewed the custom settings on our TV and remembered I'd optimized it for our analog camcorder, which we haven't used for a long time. Those settings also worked well with video cassettes. Our local video rental store had a large library of video cassettes.
I'm probably not going to change anything since the same settings seem to work well enough for DVDs and standard resolution Netflix.
The only time our long suffering TV gets to show off its 1080p HDTV capabilities is when someone (not me) attaches it to their laptop computer. Usually it's our kids when they visit.
But I must say analog video tapes look better on our HDTV than they ever did on our old analog television. I'm not going to give this HDTV up because it seems unlikely to me that newer sets will have any optimizations useful for video cassettes and analog camcorders...
