Step 6: Set your color correctly

Tuning your color setting, or saturation, has a drastic effect on overall display quality. When there's too much color, the image looks garish and unrealistic. This distortion is most noticeable with reds, which are often accentuated or pushed by the television's color decoder. If there is too little color, the picture appears drab and muted. Setting color to zero results in a completely black-and-white image. Before you start fiddling with the color, find your LCD's color-temperature control. This important feature affects the set's entire palette of hues. Select the Warm or low option, which should come closest to the government's NTSC standard of 6,500 degrees Kelvin. If the picture looks too red for your taste, try the medium setting, though that often gives results that are way too blue.

Now find an image of someone with light, delicate skin tones, preferably a close-up of a face, on a DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-ray. Turn up the color control until it looks like the person has terrible sunburn, then reduce it until the skin looks natural, without too much red. If the rest of the colors look washed out, you can increase color slightly at the expense of accurate skin tones.

Tip

Generally, DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-ray images are best when proprietary processing modes such as autocolor, auto flesh tone, autocontrast, and noise reduction are turned off.

Step 7: Further fine-tuning

For basic calibration, we recommend that you put the tint setting on your LCD television at the midway point. Another important control is the sharpness level. This function adds artificial edges to objects on the screen. Though the feature can sometimes help with soft cable signals, it almost always mars the already sharp image from a DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-ray. When watching high-quality movies, we recommend reducing the sharpness to zero unless you detect visible softening along the edges of text. (Use a disc's menu screen to test this.)

Adjusting your LCD with the quick tips we've just mentioned will yield good results, but you can do even better by investing in a home-theater setup disc. These store-bought discs offer tons of in-depth advice and calibration exercises for televisions and your entire home-theater setup. If you're game to devote the time these calibration dics require, they're excellent tools. We especially like Sound & Vision Home Theater Tune-Up, great for beginners looking for a quick way to tune up their systems, and Digital Video Essentials or The Avia Guide to Home Theater , well suited for experienced home-theater fanatics.