How to Calibrate Your Plasma TV
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A good subtitle to this article would be: How to Bring out Stunning Pictures from Your Plasma Display while Cutting Down on Power Consumption and Extending its Life. Pretty lengthy? Yes, but that sums it up pretty well, too!
Plasma TVs come out of the showroom boasting bright, flashy displays that draw you into buying them. However, once you install the TV in your home, the same bright, flashy display will be excessive and even damaging to your new appliance. Here's why:
- Plasma TVs in the showroom have their settings configured to attract customers and "out-dazzle" the competing sets sharing the floor. For example, showroom televisions have their brightness levels set too high.
- Each home and TV surroundings have different ambient light conditions, which means the optimal settings for one household might not work for the next.
- The default high contrast and brightness levels will prematurely age your plasma screen (learn more about the lifespan of flat panel TVs).
- The default brightness levels consume a tad more power than "normal" and toned down settings (learn more about power saving tips for flat panel TVs).
- Showroom settings might cause eyestrain in the long run.
Calibrating your plasma TV gives you four things:
- More vivid images optimized for your environment and preferred lighting conditions;
- Longer lifespan for your beautiful (and expensive!) TV;
- A few more dollars off the monthly power bill; and
- A comfortable experience for your eyes and senses.
Thus, you need to tone down the default settings of your plasma TV, and adjust them to match the conditions of your living room / home theater surroundings. The question is, How do you know which settings are right or wrong? And before that, What settings do I need to tweak?
There are three ways to calibrate your plasma TV: one is free but tedious, another is expensive but hassle-free, and the last straddles the line between the first two.
Do It Yourself
Costs nothing but some mind- and eye-work. While calibrating your plasma TV by your lonesome will save you hundreds of dollars, you can only approximate the "optimal" display and rely on your eyesight. If you ask us, it's better to shell out some bucks for at least a calibration disc (see below), but if you're the DIY person, here's a checklist for you. First, some pre-calibration tasks:
- Preliminary stuff #1 -- Room lighting. Where do you plan to watch TV? In a dimly-lit room or a well-lighted one? A good plasma TV setup would have a dim light directly behind the set, with the rest of the room unlit (similar to the theater experience). If you prefer to watch TV in a bright room, then calibrate your plasma display with the lights on.
- Preliminary stuff #2 -- Viewing distance. Too big a plasma screen too near your couch is uncomfortable. Before you calibrate your TV, know the viewing distance from your TV to the sofa and use this handy little tool from CNET to see which screen size suits you best.
- Preliminary stuff #3 -- Familiarize yourself with the menu. No use fiddling with your plasma TV's settings if you don't know what they mean! Surf through the options and get acquainted with the terms. Better yet, read the manual.
Now on to the main affair:
- Select the best mode. Select a picture mode such as Movie, Cinema, Film, Theater, Professional, Pro, or Pure. At the very least, settle for Normal/Standard, but definitely avoid Sports, Dynamic, and Vivid modes.
- Disable enhancements. Turn off all factory settings that affect the picture; many of them carry names such as autocolor, color correction, flesh tone, autocontrast, noise reduction, edge enhancement, detail enhancement, black level, and variants of these terms.
- Color temperature. Go for the Warm/Normal/Low preset, which is close to the ideal color temperature of 6500 degrees Kelvin.
- Brightness. When tweaking the brightness, you're actually adjusting the TV's black level. This is best done using a calibration disc, which provides you with a PLUGE pattern (a black-and-white screen divided into various shades of grays). Without a disc, just trust your eyes -- the right brightness will show shadow detail even in the deepest black.
- Contrast. Also called white or picture level, contrast is best adjusted with a calibration disc. If you don't have any, test scenes where black and white objects sit side by side. You know you're good to go if the border between those areas is a sharp line, as opposed to a smear. White colors must still show impurities and aren't "washed out" (such as snowed land having cracks).
- Sharpness. This is difficult to adjust without a calibration disc. Suffice it to say, increasing sharpness adds artificial edges to objects on the image. Sharp images might appeal to you, but they're unrealistic and ruins the already-sharp images from DVDs. Lower your TV's sharpness level to your liking, just don't let it stay at factory settings.
- Color and Tint. Again, the best results come from using a calibration disc, but just use your memory of what "normal" colors should look like. Test scenes with your country's flag on it. Adjust the settings until actors' flesh tones appear realistic and not sunburned or deathly pallid.
If you decide to go the DIY route, for best results, repeat the calibration after a few months. By then your plasma TV has settled into its environment, and some of the settings need to be corrected again.
Calibration Disc
As evident in the previous section, plasma TV calibration is made a lot easier just by using a calibration disc. Here are some reasons why they save you a lot of time:
- They provide you with step-by-step (sometimes divided into "Chapters") guides in tweaking the individual settings of your plasma display. For example, one chapter deals with brightness, the other with sharpness, and so on.
- They provide you with test patterns (e.g. PLUGE), images, and real video for easy adjusting.
- They provide audio calibration, to boot.
Some of the popular (and affordable) calibration discs out there:
- Avia: http://www.ovationmultimedia.com
- DVE: http://www.videoessentials.com
- Monster/ISF: http://www.hometheaterblog.com (a good review and overview)
- GetGray: http://www.calibrate.tv (you'll need to download this from the Internet and burn it onto a DVD)
Professional Help
Ever heard of an ISF (Imaging Science Foundation) technician? These guys are the masters of plasma TV calibration.
ISF calibration, as it is called, will cost you serious bucks, but in the end the expense will be worth it. ISF professionals can adjust settings that few laymen TV owners can understand, and they have thousands of dollars worth of calibrating equipment to help them do the job. A plasma TV calibrated by an ISF pro will give you stunning results. You can look for the nearest ISF professional in your state (U.S.) or country here.
If money is an issue for you, you might want to check out this page to get a feel of how much an ISF professional charges. (Take note that the rates might vary from one ISF calibrator to another.)
Also, this thread on the High Def Forum will give you a peek into what an ISF professional does with your plasma TV. (It's quite technical, though.) And if you're still undecided whether professional calibration is worth it (and not a money-making enterprise on the part of the ISF guys), read this CNET article, in which the author vouches for an ISF pro.
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