Please help me calibrate my tv

[DaneClark]

I just got a new vizio smart tv, and I'm trying to calibrate it so that my standard definition DVDs of animated cartoons look as close as they did on my old catharay-tube set as possible. Right now the cartoons have a very unnatural looking glowing effect to them, especially in the red areas. I want to keep my DVD player connected through the HDMI.

[Baldrick]

Try lower or disable any sharpness or edge enhancements filters.

[jagabo]

Also disable automatic brightness, contrast, and color features. Turn of motion smoothing if your TV has it.

[fritzi93]

You didn't specify the model # of your TV. There's almost certainly a thread dedicated to your TV in the AVS forum, LCD sub-forum. Search your model #:

http://www.avsforum.com/f/166/lcd-flat-panel-displays

Chances are high someone had a pro calibration done or at least did a competent job using a calibration disc. You could try settings posted there as a starting point. And also try asking other owners there your question. You may want to set up a custom setting just for animation.

At any rate, it does sound like what you describe may be edge enhancement, as Baldrick says. Also, if you haven't gotten your TV off "Vivid" setting, do so. It's there to sell TVs in a brightly-lit showroom, and is unsuitable for the home (someone is bound to disagree).

[sanlyn]

Good basic advice so far. Your description has more to do with saturation, red "push", and a few other problems. You didn't specify which model Vizio you have. Most HDTV's have common controls that are used to adjust image quality. Some have more elaborate controls than others, but usually there are a least these: Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Tint.

First, try these adjustments with something that has a good color and luma balance to begin with, such as a good retail DVD movie. Most TV stations transmit a crappy picture that will make things far too difficult. Set your TV to a natural color balance setting -- -avoid settings like "Game", "Sports", or other phoney enhancements. Usually there is a setting for "Neutral" or "Movie". If there is a color temperature setting, set it to Warm rather than something like Cool. Set Contrast, Brightness, Tint, and Saturation to their neutral or default positions. Turn off sharpeners, motion control, or other effects. Make these adjustments in a room with subdued lighting, and don't have bright lights in front of the screen or reflecting off of it. On the other hand, don't try this in a totally dark room: your eyes will over-adjust to what appears to be a very bright picture in a dark room in a way that won't reflect the way you use your TV.

The basic image controls are usually adjusted in this order:

Contrast usually controls the highlights, or brightest areas. If brights have an unnatural glow and peak so much that things such as skin highlights and brights appear to blend, "expand", or "glow", contrast is too high. The contrast control often goes by name of "Picture" or some other name. Adjust contrast at least so that bright skin highlights don't look like a sweaty day at the beach and white shirts don't try to jump off the screen.

Brightness: Despite the control's name, Brightness is designed to affect black levels. The darkest parts of the image should be set so that darks are not so blackish as to look grimy or to obscure other dark detail, but not so bright as to make blacks look grayish or to appear unnaturally illuminated. This isn't as easy as trying it with a CRT, because LCD's don't have the talent for dark detail that a good CRT has, but it's not too difficult. Look at things like very dark hair and set blacks so that hair detail doesn't gum up into black blobs.

Brightness and contrast tend to interact, but brightness mostly controls the darkest areas and contrast controls mostly the bright areas. You have to jockey back and forth between the two to find the best balance between them.

Saturation (sometimes called "color" or "intensity") literally controls the amount of color modulation. Over-saturation causes much of the posterized or noisy, bleeding, and "hot" effects you describe. Lowering or raising saturation doesn't affect the hue of colors; it only affects the amount that colors are "pumped". It affects all colors across the spectrum. But lowering it will mitigate many problems.

The Tint control does affect hues. Most tint controls affect greens and reds. Moving the control in one direction will increase reds and lower greens. Moving the control in the opposite direction increases green and reduces red. Usually, if you adjust Tint as the last of these 4 steps, the best way to use the tint control is to observe its effect on flesh tones. If skin looks too red, adjust the Tint toward green. If people look green, orange, or yellow, adjust toward red.

Other TV's have additional controls that can tweak individual color properties more precisely than the Tint control. Among the individual color adjustments I've seen on Vizio and similar TV's are Red, Green, and Blue adjustments. Sometimes these controls are grouped in the "Advanced" or "White Balance" group. It takes quite a bit of experience and eyeballing to use these controls. But obviously if objects that are supposed to look white appear too blue, the adjustment to make would be to reduce blue. If blacks don't look like real black (they might have a green, blue, or reddish tint), one or two of the R G B colors needs adjustment. This is really difficult if you aren't accustomed to it -- which is why many people use software and hardware accessories to make those adjustments. The R G B colors can be adjusted at the dark end (usually called "bias" controls) and at the bright end of the spectrum (usually called "gain" controls, someimes called "Contrast" for each color). You will usually find these advanced controls in TV's from Samsung, LG, and SONY. I did see these controls in a somewhat basic form on a friend's Vizio TV.

Adjusting individual R G B quality is far more effective -- and far more complicated -- than using a simple Tint control. This is referred to as correcting the grayscale or adjusting RGB curves. Sound complicated? Well, it is. But there are tools (not free) that can help, and they are extremely effective. Why is it called "adjusting the grayscale"? Think of it this way: a middle or neutral gray, which is what photogs and cameramen look at when they adjust color balance, is just a plain old gray that consists of equal amounts of three colors, Red, Green, and Blue. In equal proportions, the three colors will form a perfectly untinted gray. If you can make a neutral gray look really neutral, all three colors will be in perfect balance. For example, very dark blacks at an RGB range of RGB 16 will consist of Red 16, Green 16, Blue 16. A middle gray will be RGB 128-128-128. A bright white will be RGB 235-235-235. If you can get at least those three test hues in perfect balance, all the other colors will fall into place properly.

A simple but fairly effective and popular tool is the DVE (Digital Video Essentials) calibration disc. Not all that expensive, but effective for most users. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000V6LST0/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative...calibration-20 . The DVE has been around for a long time, since the earliest DVD players. It has a brief tuitorial and demo that explains all this stuff in consumer-level detail with plenty of illustrations and demos to make things clear. The demo is followed by a calibration walkthru that works with any TV, even if you lack some of the more advanced controls. All you need is the disc, the little set of transparent viewing filters that come with it, and your TV remote.

There are several copy-cat and ripoff versions of DVE. Stick with the original.

If you think it's expensive, consider what many videophiles go through to thoroughly calibrate a TV with advanced controls. Try $300 for starters, go up to 2 or 5 times that much for an ISF certified calibration expert, or get your own pro gear starting at around $5000. If all you have to spend is a couple of hundred bucks, you can do what a great many people do: get something like an EyeOne colorimeter, a laptop, a free (or paid) grayscale test disc, and the free HCFR program, as used in this popular tutorial: Greyscale And Colour Calibration For Dummies. The link is to the old version that uses hardware and software which are still available. Newer hardware is covered by the web page's link to the update version.

The EyeOne and its newer replacement can be also be used to calibrate your PC monitor, and is really the best way to do it: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/eye_one_display2.htm

[DaneClark]

Is there a way to turn down the saturation without making the colors look faded?

[jman98]

In case this helps any, in my limited experience (I do own a Vizio HDTV) their TVs ship with some kind of motion setting that makes all videos look like videotape. They have that "live" look to them that videotaped shows have. As I did not watch any cartoons/animation before I figured out how to turn this off, I can't comment on what such might do to cartoons, but it probably doesn't help. I absolutely despise the look that gives to movies, but I have a good friend whose Samsung HDTV has the same setting and it doesn't bother him at all. If you don't like the way that live action movies/TV shows look with that setting on (I'm sure it's on for your TV unless you deliberately turned it off), you might try turning that off and see if that makes a difference in what you see with cartoons. If I remember correctly, I had to change motion smoothness and some setting that uses FILM as its setting rather than whatever the default was (I don't remember the other choices).

[DaneClark]

The main problem is that the color from red and brown is bleeding into the black outlines. I want to fix this in a way that will keep the colors as accurate as possible and won't make them look faded.