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It's a sad but undeniable truth that most people who've forked out for lovely new HD TVs aren't getting anywhere near the best out of them.
For starters, recent research from the British Video Association suggests that as many as six million people who own HD TVs aren't feeding it any HD sources. So if you happen to be one of those, you will find that adding a Freeview/Freesat HD receiver, Blu-ray player and/or HD games console will immediately raise your TV's performance massively! You can have that one 'for free', though; it's not going to count as one of our 10 ways to improve your HD TV's picture quality.
Instead, our 10 tips look like this:
1. Reduce the picture's contrast and brightness settings
Sadly, the vast majority of TVs ship with pretty awful picture presets - mostly because manufacturers are more interested in creating pictures that stand out from the crowd (with ultra-vivid colours and high brightness levels) than they are in creating pictures that are actually accurate and believable.
The single biggest culprits here are the brightness and contrast settings, with one or often both being set far higher than they should be. This can lead to excessive video noise levels, poor black level response, bleached bright picture elements, and unnatural, unsubtle colours. In other words, these settings can sell your TV severely short.
With every TV having different image characteristics and different setting parameters, it's impossible for us to provide you with exact settings you should use for contrast and brightness. But as a general rule, we'd suggest reducing brightness levels to around 50% of their maximum value, and contrast to between 65 and 75% of its maximum value.
If your TV also has a backlight control, you should play around with this too, focusing on trying to get the right balance between removing greyness from black parts of the picture and allowing shadow detail to remain in dark picture areas.
2. Make sure you're using the right connections
This one sounds simple, but it's startling how many people don't realise that you have to connect an HD source to your HD TV by component video or HDMI cables in order to get HD pictures on your screen. Scarts, composite video or S-Video connections just won't do.
We'd also recommend that you opt for an HDMI connection over a component video one if you have the choice, since the HDMI allows for a pure, all-digital signal transmission while the component route requires digital HD signals to be converted to analogue for the transmission process.
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