How to Calibrate Your TV for the Best Picture Quality

Your brand new 85 inch TV might not look its best straight out of the box. Manufacturers typically configure display settings for bright retail showrooms, prioritising eye-catching visuals over accurate reproduction. With some basic calibration knowledge, you can dramatically improve picture quality without any special equipment—just your eyes and a few minutes of adjustment.

Why Factory Settings Aren't Optimal

Television manufacturers face a challenge: their products need to look impressive in brightly-lit retail environments where they're displayed alongside competitors. To stand out, factory presets often feature boosted brightness, oversaturated colours, and excessive sharpening. These settings may look punchy in a store but result in an unnatural, fatiguing image in your living room.

Proper calibration brings the picture closer to how content creators intended their work to be viewed. Films look more cinematic, skin tones appear natural, and you can watch for hours without eye strain. The difference is often remarkable—like lifting a veil from the screen.

Before You Begin: Understanding Picture Modes

Every modern TV includes preset picture modes that adjust multiple settings at once. Before diving into individual adjustments, selecting the right base mode gives you a solid starting point.

Filmmaker Mode

If your TV offers Filmmaker Mode (increasingly common on 2024 and later models), this is often the best starting point. This mode, developed in collaboration with filmmakers, automatically disables post-processing effects like motion smoothing and maintains the original frame rate and colour characteristics of content. It's designed to display films exactly as directors intended.

Basic Calibration Settings

Step 1: Adjust Backlight/OLED Light

The backlight control (called OLED Light on OLED TVs) adjusts the overall brightness of the panel. This doesn't affect the picture quality itself—just how bright it appears. Set this based on your room's ambient lighting:

• Dark room: 30-50% backlight prevents eye strain
• Dim room: 50-70% provides comfortable viewing
• Bright room: 70-100% compensates for ambient light

There's no single correct setting—adjust based on what feels comfortable in your actual viewing conditions. You may want different settings for day and night viewing.

Step 2: Set Contrast Correctly

Contrast controls how bright the brightest parts of the image appear. Set too high, and bright areas lose detail—clouds become featureless white blobs, and highlights clip harshly. Set too low, and the image looks flat and washed out.

To calibrate contrast, find a scene with bright clouds against a blue sky, or bright white clothing against a varied background. Increase contrast until the bright areas begin to lose subtle detail, then back off slightly. You want to see texture and gradation in the brightest areas, not flat white.

Step 3: Calibrate Brightness

Despite its name, the brightness control actually sets the black level—how dark the darkest parts of the image appear. Setting this incorrectly is one of the most common calibration errors.

Find a scene with dark areas that should contain subtle shadow detail—a dimly lit room or a night scene works well. Lower brightness until the darkest areas become pure black, then raise it slightly until you can just perceive shadow detail. Dark areas should be dark but still reveal texture and gradation.

Step 4: Adjust Colour Saturation

The colour (or saturation) control adjusts how vivid colours appear. Factory settings often boost this excessively, making everything look oversaturated and artificial.

The best reference for colour calibration is human skin tones. Find content with close-up shots of people with various skin tones. Adjust colour until skin looks natural—not orange, not pale, not overly pink. When skin tones look right, other colours generally fall into place.

Step 5: Set Sharpness Appropriately

Counterintuitively, the sharpness control rarely needs to be set high. This setting adds artificial edge enhancement that can create visible haloing around objects and actually obscure fine detail.

For most 4K content, a sharpness setting of zero or very low (10-20%) produces the most natural, detailed image. The native resolution of your TV and content provides all the sharpness needed. Higher settings are only occasionally useful for lower-resolution content being upscaled.

Advanced Calibration

Colour Temperature

Colour temperature affects the overall warmth or coolness of the image. Settings labelled "Warm" or "Warm 2" most closely match the D65 standard used in film and television production. Despite feeling slightly yellow at first if you're accustomed to cooler settings, this produces the most accurate colours.

Give yourself time to adjust—the "Warm" setting may seem wrong initially if you've been watching a blue-tinted image, but your eyes will adapt within a few days, and you'll wonder how you watched any other way.

Motion Handling

Modern TVs include motion processing features with various names—Motion Smoothing, TruMotion, Motionflow, Auto Motion Plus. These features insert interpolated frames to reduce motion blur, but they also create what's often called the "soap opera effect," making films look like cheap video.

For film and scripted television, we recommend disabling motion smoothing entirely. For sports, some motion processing can reduce blur during fast action—experiment to find your preference. For gaming, always disable motion processing as it adds input lag.

Local Dimming (LED/Mini LED TVs)

If your TV uses LED backlighting with local dimming, you'll find settings ranging from Low to High. Higher settings improve contrast but may introduce visible blooming around bright objects. Start with Medium and adjust based on whether you notice distracting halos in dark scenes with bright elements.

Creating Multiple Presets

Most modern TVs allow you to save different picture settings for different inputs or content types. Consider creating separate profiles for:

• Movies: Cinema mode, warm colour temperature, motion smoothing off
• Daytime TV: Slightly higher brightness, standard colour temperature
• Gaming: Game mode enabled, motion processing disabled
• Sports: Higher brightness, optional motion processing

When to Consider Professional Calibration

The adjustments above will dramatically improve picture quality for most viewers. However, if you want truly reference-accurate colour reproduction, professional calibration using specialised equipment can fine-tune settings beyond what's possible by eye. Professional calibrators use colorimeters and spectrophotometers to measure exact colour points and adjust the TV's internal colour management system.

Professional calibration typically costs $300-500 in Australia and is worth considering for premium OLED or high-end Mini LED displays in dedicated viewing rooms. For most viewers, however, the basic calibration steps above deliver excellent results.