Recommended TV Picture Settings

General Picture Settings 

Here are the most common settings that exist across TVs — note that some of them have slight variations in naming, and not all TVs have all settings.

 

We are also specifying the values in percent. Most TVs do this, but if your TV has Brightness on a scale of 0-20, a 50% setting would be equivalent to setting it to 10.

 

Picture mode: Cinema or Movie (NOT Sports, Vivid, Dynamic etc)

Sharpness: 0% (This is the most crucial one to set to zero — although Sony sometimes uses 50% for the “off” setting, confusingly. If the image becomes blurry at 0%, try 50%)

Backlight: Whatever is comfortable, but usually at 100% for daytime use. Adjusting this will not detoriate picture quality.

Contrast: 100%

Brightness: 50%

Color: 50%

Hue: 0%

Gamma: 2.2 (or 0 if the TV doesn’t have it in a range of 1.8-2.9 but uses whole numbers instead)

Tint (G/R): 50%

Picture Size or Aspect Ratio or Overscan:

Screen Fit (Samsung)

Just Scan (LG)

Wide Mode: Full (Sony) and Display Area: Full Pixel (Sony)

This may also show up as “Overscan: Off”

In general, you want to be able to see the TV name and clock from the Highfive device in the corners with a bit of available space around them — they should not be all the way up against the edges. Cycle through the various modes if it’s not named like the ones above, you’ll quickly see what is the 1:1 setting, and which ones cut off part of the picture.

 

Advanced Settings

 

Turn off any kind of interpolation, image/picture processing, or other things that claim to “improve” the image quality. The only exception is “Game Mode” or sometimes “Computer Mode”, which generally enables faster frame rates (it bypasses a lot of the processing we don’t want), and which you’ll want to be ON for a real-time application like Highfive — if your TV has it.

 

Some Advanced Settings that should be turned OFF:

 

Samsung:

Dynamic Contrast: Off

Black Tone: Off

Flesh Tone: 0

Gamma: 0

Motion Lighting: Off

Digital Clean View: Off

Smart LED: Off

 

LG:

Super Resolution: Off

Dynamic Color: Off

Clear White: Off

Motion Eye Care: Off

TruMotion: Off

Real Cinema: Off

 

Vizio:

Black Detail: Off

Active LED Zones: Off

Clear Action: Off

Gamma: 2.2

 

Sony:

Noise Reduction: Off

MPEG Noise Reduction: Off

Dot Noise Reduction: Off

Reality Creation: Off

Smooth Gradation: Off

Motionflow: Off

CineMotion: Off

Black Corrector: Off

Auto Light Limiter: Off

Clear White: Off

Live Color: Off

Detail Enhancer: Off

Edge Enhancer: Off

SBM: Off

 

Others:

Edge Enhancement: Off

Motion Interpolation: Off