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Setup Tips: TLC for Your HDTV

At default settings, most TVs exaggerate color and brightness in order to grab attention on a showroom floor. But you probably want something subtler in your living room. Once you buy, invest in full-blown calibration. Colors will be richer, details will pop out, and your TV is likely to last longer.

Basic Settings: A Good Start

To adjust brightness and contrast, choose content with shadows or other dark details, then turn down the brightness until the blacks are truly black. If light areas look too dark, turn up the contrast.

If your HDTV's image mode is something like Vivid or Dynamic, try out a more subdued setting--Standard or Cinema, perhaps. Then check the Color Temperature or the White Balance. A low, or warm, value adds a reddish tint; a high or cool value adds a bluish tint. Choose a middle setting, which should come closest to 6500 Kelvin--that's the industry standard for displaying all TV and DVD content.

Finally, make sure the sharpness isn't set too high, which can create an artificial shimmer on textures or a halo effect around details.

These adjustments, while helpful, aren't as good as full-scale calibration.

Basic Calibration: Better Yet

Calibration's goal is to make content on your TV look the way its creators intended. You can do basic calibration yourself using DVDs such as Avia Guide to Home Theater ($50), Digital Video Essentials ($25), and Sound & Vision Home Theater Tune-Up ($16). These kits walk you through the process using test screens with known colors, contrast levels, and the like. Sound & Vision is best for newbies, Avia is more advanced, and DVE is the geekiest of the three.

Professional calibrators can make tweaks to your TV that you simply cannot. They can precisely measure color intensities and color temperature, and they have the codes required to access the set's service menu. (Even if you can reach those menus, using some controls without proper training can blow a power supply, cause a plasma screen to crack, or inflict other serious damage.)

The Imaging Science Foundation, which trains and certifies calibrators, says you should expect to pay $250 for basic calibration of a plasma or LCD TV and $275 for a rear-projection model. Prices go up for multiple content sources (such as an HDTV and a DVD player). Those fees aren't unreasonable for a set costing $5000 or more. You can find ISF-certified calibrators at www.imagingscience.com.