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Also just to piggy back on this, every television I have ever purchased has been calibrated like HOT, SICK ASS from the factory. Step ONE every time I buy a TV

Also just to piggy back on this, every television I have ever purchased has been calibrated like HOT, SICK ASS from the factory. Step ONE every time I buy a TV is to spend a half an hour or so using tons of calibration images to get it dialed in to a sensible setting, and it's shocking how much a lot of them need changed. Almost every TV comes calibrated to be used as a display unit in the store which means contrast is rammed through the roof, brightness is way up, they usually have about 15 different kinds of smoothing or frame interpolation going, "denoisiers," color filtering for some insane reason, it's fucking ridiculous. This is honestly why most of the time I buy cheap ass off-brand TV's because there's just less bullshit to turn off when the TV has "fewer" features.

jorvi 3y ago
> Step ONE every time I buy a TV is to spend a half an hour or so using tons of calibration images to get it dialed in to a sensible setting, and it's shocking how much a lot of them need changed. Eh. Usually you can flip it to movie + warm(2) + dynamic contrast off + enhancements off (think noise reduction) and you’re 90% there. You can get a smidge better picture with calibration images, but most midrange+ TVs come decently calibrated out of the factory these days. Not really worth the effort unless you go all the way and use a colorimeter.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  The problem is finding all of those settings. They're all under different submenus (there's certainly no global "enhancements off" toggle), and even figuring out the "no filter" setting is often non-obvious. E.g. on my Epson projector, there's a "sharpness" setting that goes from 1 to 10, and IIRC the only way to turn off sharpening is to set it to 3. Because values 1 and 2 wind up applying a blur filter. It's not documented. You have to figure out the "3" value from trial and error with a calibration image. Similarly you need to figure out whether each of your connected devices is outputting RGB 0-255 or RGB 16-235, and set the toggles for your TV to handle the correct input range. And so forth. The calibration images aren't for figuring out perfect color accuracy with a colorimeter. They're for basic things like displaying smooth gradients from black to white, and are the blacks or whites being cut off? Is the gamma totally off when compared to a checkerboard? Are saturation gradients displaying normally or does it show the image is over-saturated? Is a series of alternating black and white lines displaying as simple lines, or is there a crunchy halo around them (from sharpening) or blurring? So it's not "eh" at all. In my experience it takes 15 to 30 minutes, as you hunt around the submenus to try to find all the relevant settings, and try to figure out what each setting even means since the documentation is useless. Like, on a power-saving display, should the main color setting be "Natural" or "Cinema" or "Bright Cinema"? You're going to have to experiment.
akvadrako 3y ago
Doesn't your TV have a filmmaker mode which is pre-calibrated?
crazygringo 3y ago
It's so true. Honestly I will never understand it. Even just talking about SDR for the moment, films and TV shows have a lot of work put in so that their color, brightness, sharpness and contrast are just right. And then modern TV settings apply all sorts of filters that just destroy it. It's bizarre. I do the same thing you do in terms of calibration and it takes forever. All just to get it to act like a dumb monitor for my Apple TV. I just want it to display the signal and nothing more. So many people are watching TV and films with weird color, weird contrast, and weird swimmy frame interpolation. And that's before you get to HDR where it's weird dark on top of it all. It genuinely makes me want there to be either a government regulatory body or else some kind of private-organization seal that guarantees you get a normal-color, normal-contrast, normal-brightness, normal-motion image as filmmakers and TV producers intend. You can have all the other options too, but either make them non-default, or provide a single-click "director's choice high-fidelity (TM)" option to undo all the garbage they add. Or something like that. Because it's completely out of control.
- Jerrrry 3y ago
  Even every phone's pre-installed camera app has proto-face-recognition derived smoothing at a very fundamental level. It's not even possible to turn off in some - you have to install a "dumb" camera app.
Hnrobert42 3y ago
Where do you get the reference images, how do you display them on the tv, and to what do you compare them? I guess I should just search how to calibrate a tv.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  These are my go-tos: https://www.eizo.be/monitor-test/ https://www.eizo.be/monitor-test/ Don't cover everything and will be useless for HDR, but they're a good starting point IMO for SDR.

jorvi 3y ago

> Step ONE every time I buy a TV is to spend a half an hour or so using tons of calibration images to get it dialed in to a sensible setting, and it's shocking how much a lot of them need changed. Eh. Usually you can flip it to movie + warm(2) + dynamic contrast off + enhancements off (think noise reduction) and you’re 90% there. You can get a smidge better picture with calibration images, but most midrange+ TVs come decently calibrated out of the factory these days. Not really worth the effort unless you go all the way and use a colorimeter.

crazygringo 3y ago
The problem is finding all of those settings. They're all under different submenus (there's certainly no global "enhancements off" toggle), and even figuring out the "no filter" setting is often non-obvious. E.g. on my Epson projector, there's a "sharpness" setting that goes from 1 to 10, and IIRC the only way to turn off sharpening is to set it to 3. Because values 1 and 2 wind up applying a blur filter. It's not documented. You have to figure out the "3" value from trial and error with a calibration image. Similarly you need to figure out whether each of your connected devices is outputting RGB 0-255 or RGB 16-235, and set the toggles for your TV to handle the correct input range. And so forth. The calibration images aren't for figuring out perfect color accuracy with a colorimeter. They're for basic things like displaying smooth gradients from black to white, and are the blacks or whites being cut off? Is the gamma totally off when compared to a checkerboard? Are saturation gradients displaying normally or does it show the image is over-saturated? Is a series of alternating black and white lines displaying as simple lines, or is there a crunchy halo around them (from sharpening) or blurring? So it's not "eh" at all. In my experience it takes 15 to 30 minutes, as you hunt around the submenus to try to find all the relevant settings, and try to figure out what each setting even means since the documentation is useless. Like, on a power-saving display, should the main color setting be "Natural" or "Cinema" or "Bright Cinema"? You're going to have to experiment.

akvadrako 3y ago

Doesn't your TV have a filmmaker mode which is pre-calibrated?

crazygringo 3y ago

It's so true. Honestly I will never understand it. Even just talking about SDR for the moment, films and TV shows have a lot of work put in so that their color, brightness, sharpness and contrast are just right. And then modern TV settings apply all sorts of filters that just destroy it. It's bizarre. I do the same thing you do in terms of calibration and it takes forever. All just to get it to act like a dumb monitor for my Apple TV. I just want it to display the signal and nothing more. So many people are watching TV and films with weird color, weird contrast, and weird swimmy frame interpolation. And that's before you get to HDR where it's weird dark on top of it all. It genuinely makes me want there to be either a government regulatory body or else some kind of private-organization seal that guarantees you get a normal-color, normal-contrast, normal-brightness, normal-motion image as filmmakers and TV producers intend. You can have all the other options too, but either make them non-default, or provide a single-click "director's choice high-fidelity (TM)" option to undo all the garbage they add. Or something like that. Because it's completely out of control.

Jerrrry 3y ago
Even every phone's pre-installed camera app has proto-face-recognition derived smoothing at a very fundamental level. It's not even possible to turn off in some - you have to install a "dumb" camera app.

Hnrobert42 3y ago

Where do you get the reference images, how do you display them on the tv, and to what do you compare them? I guess I should just search how to calibrate a tv.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
These are my go-tos: https://www.eizo.be/monitor-test/ https://www.eizo.be/monitor-test/ Don't cover everything and will be useless for HDR, but they're a good starting point IMO for SDR.