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How To Get The Best Picture On Your HDTV

Posted: 03 Mar 2011 07:30 AM PST

I have a very connected home, with each of my HDTVs connected to a Windows 7 Media Center, with all of my music, photos and videos stored on server machine that also acts as a TV tuner farm. I’ve spent many man hours over the last couple of years configuring my media centers to get the best drivers, codecs, 1080p performance, flac support, blu-ray performance etc, but until this week I’d never really touched the TV display controls on my displays.

This was partly because of laziness, but mainly because I have to admit I didn’t know how to get the best picture possible out of my HDTV displays. Whilst reading one of my favourite sites, Missing Remote, I spotted an old post which gave simple instructions on how to calibrate the settings within your HDTV e.g. brightness, sharpness, contrast, colour balance etc to get the best possible picture.

Optimizing each of my displays took me around 5 minutes using the guide and a few test patterns on disk, and the improvement in picture quality was amazing. Even my wife who at times finds it hard to distinguish between SD and HD quality, immediately saw the difference on our main display.