Give Your TV a Tune-Up for Super Bowl LIX

All TVs now come with a menu of picture modes with names such as “vivid,” “natural,” “sports,” and “cinema.” When you select one, the brightness, contrast, and sharpness are adjusted to preset values.

Our advice: Don’t choose “sports” mode for watching sports—or anything else. That could artificially boost brightness, contrast, and colors, and turn on motion smoothing (more on that below). Stay away from the “vivid” and “dynamic” modes, too. They tend to overemphasize contrast and sharpness, and lower the brightness to less-than-optimal levels.

Instead, we’ve found that modes with names like “natural,” “cinema,” and “movie” generally provide the best results. If your TV has a Filmmaker Mode, try it. It’s the one that gets most TVs closest to our own calibrated settings.

With us so far? Once you’ve selected one of those preset modes, many TVs let you tweak the picture’s appearance further while staying in that mode. On other sets, once you start additional fiddling, the TV will automatically shift to a “custom” or “preference” mode. Either way, the following steps will be the same.

Brightness level: This is also called black level, and it’s critical for top picture quality. Ideally, a TV should be able to display deep black areas of the picture without losing the detail within the darkest areas. Freeze-frame a nighttime scene, such as one from a Batman or vampire movie. Turn the brightness/black level up until you can see the details in the image’s darkest areas. Then turn it down so that the black gets as black as possible without obscuring the detail. With most LCD sets, you won’t get as deep a black as you can with an OLED TV.

Contrast: Also called white level, contrast affects how bright the picture looks. Find an image with lots of white—say, a wedding gown or a sky full of puffy white clouds. Lower the contrast until you can see all the detail, such as the shadows in the folds of the gown or the subtle gray shadings in the clouds. Then raise it to get the brightest picture possible without washing out those details. You’ll generally want to set the contrast below the maximum level.

Color and tint: Once the black-and-white balance is optimized, it’s time to adjust the color settings. Start with color temperature, which is sometimes called color tone. We recommend choosing the “warm” or “low” setting so that whites don’t appear too blue. Then adjust the tint/hue control so that flesh tones look natural, neither too red nor too greenish-yellow. This setting generally works best when it’s in the middle of the range. Adjust the color-level control (saturation) so that colors look vivid and realistic but not like they’re glowing. All of these settings may interact with one another in odd ways, so repeat the process as necessary.

Sharpness and more: Manufacturers often set the sharpness control rather high and turn on noise-reduction and other image-enhancement modes. These are rarely needed when you’re watching high-quality HD programming or a Blu-ray movie. In most cases, you should resist the temptation to crank up the sharpness to enhance HD’s fine detail. The best HDTVs need little or no help showing all the resolution in HD images. If you set the sharpness control too high, the background will start to look grainy and a halo will appear around the edges of certain objects, making the overall image appear less natural. We suggest that you turn the sharpness control down to zero, then add sharpness sparingly if the image looks soft. Turn off any noise-reduction and image-enhancement modes, as well; those tend to reduce image detail.

One final thing to consider. Some TVs let you store different picture settings for different video inputs, such as cable TV, a streaming device, or a Blu-ray player. It could be worth storing customized settings for these inputs because the brightness, color, and other picture attributes can vary based on what device is supplying the video.

Other than being at the Super Bowl in person, there’s no better way to catch all the action than with a big-screen TV that has great overall picture quality. These 65-inch sets at various prices fit the bill. And don’t be afraid to go even bigger. Most of these models are also available in larger screen sizes.