What happens when you adjust your TV settings for dark scenes



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The night is dark and … well. Mainly just black.
Screenshot: David Murphy

Far too many people had to adjust their TVs to watch Sunday's programs. Game of thrones episode. In fact, there were so many items on Monday morning on all the settings that you should try to launch – brightness, contrast, gamma, picture modes, your backlight, and so on. that you probably have a very different picture on your TV now than before. The Battle of Winterfell claims a lot; The picture quality of your TV is no exception.

I hope you have saved your settings before you start playing with everything. Otherwise, we have a guide to get a good picture once you have reset your TV to its default settings (so you can start over, of course).

However, it is also good to know a little about what you have adjusted (or if you plan to adjust it for a new watch). It's fun to change the random settings on your TV until you see a black undead zombie, an armor entirely black, a race around a dark castle at night. It is important to understand what these settings actually do. make in the picture. You want your TV to look the best, and it's important to know how its settings interact to create the perfect display.

Brightness

Brightness is a fun concept, mainly due to the way its nits are measured. A nit is equal to about 1 candela per square meter (often abbreviated as "cd / m2"), or the relative brightness of a single candle. Do not forget that for your next Peril! appearance.

I also like the way Geoffrey Morrison of CNET says it:

"This quantity of light, spread over one square meter, corresponds to a nit. In other words, imagine a box of 40.8 cm (16 inches) on each side, with a candle in the middle. The total amount of light striking the inner surface of this box is 1 nit. "

When you adjust the brightness of your TV, you adjust the level of "absolute black". In other words, you play with the degree of "darkness" of the darker parts of your image. Increase it, and you will get more gray instead of true black, but not necessarily more detail, and probably more faded image. Lower it and you may lose the subtle details of the dark areas of your image (a slightly black shirt against a darker jacket against a dark wall, for example).

For example, here is what my monitor looks like with its normal brightness setting (~ 48), as well as bent fully (100) and turned all the way (0). Note the effects of the different brightness levels on the gray levels:

Standard * brightness

* I usually set my monitor's brightness level to 48 (out of 100), based on the results of a previous calibration.

Maximum brightness

Hello, faded image. Also, note that you might not get a tonne If you need a little extra help for TV shows or darker movies, you can probably tap a little harder on the brightness of your TV.

Minimum brightness

Just not. Examine all the details you miss throughout the gradient.


Contrast

Adjusting your TV's contrast does not necessarily change the difference between light and dark areas, as TechHive's Jon L. Jacobi described in a 2017 article. Instead, you simply change the notion of absolute white from your TV, like what you did when you changed the brightness control.

That's why the brightness and contrast settings go together when calibrating a screen. (This is also why you want to adjust the brightness, contrast, then go back and check the brightness to make sure this small interaction gives you the maximum detail you can extract from your TV or monitor. .)

As before, here's what these real-world adjustments look like:

Standard contrast *

* In general, the contrast level of my monitor is set to 70 (out of 100), based on the results of a previous calibration.

Maximum contrast

Not a huge difference between that and 70, it seems. You can, however, distinguish slightly more detail in the darkest grayscale, but you can clear the whites a bit.

Less contrast

For comparison, here is what the contrast looks like when I set it at 35, since it will be adjusted to its lowest value, as you will soon see.

Minimum contrast

Perfect for Batman, not so great for … watching anything. You do not see anything, Jon Snow.


Backlight

Adjusting the "backlight" of your TV, if one exists, also affects its brightness. In fact, your TV maker might even use the term "backlight" in their setup menu to refer to what is usually called "brightness" control, or vice versa, like Alex in the end. Gizmodo previously described.

In a perfect world, the brightness controls affect the black level of your TV and the backlight controls affect the intensity of your TV's LEDs. If you're still worried about the backlight of your TV, Linus Sebastian has an excellent primary (though older):

As a general rule, if you are satisfied with the look of your TV (or if you have done calibration tests to make sure you get as much detail as possible), you should probably play with the setting of the TV. backlight. want a little more detail in darker scenes. Once you're done, set it to what you were when you first "perfected" your TV's settings.

Here is a quick overview of how the adjustments are presented, using a darker scene of Interstellar on my TCL LED TV with on-board backlight.

Lower backlight

This is what this beautiful space scene Interstellar looks like with the backlight of my TV set to 0.

Medium backlight

Same picture, but I set the backlight to 50.

Highest backlight

The backlight level is now at maximum: 100. As you will see, you get a little more detail in the darkest areas, but you also erase the whites, the big fight.


Gamma

I've been reviewing the monitors for years and I still struggle to find a great way to describe the "gamma". Here is one of my favorite descriptions, again thanks to Geoffrey Morrison from CNET:

"If you adjust the gamma on your TV, it changes the appearance of" gray "blacks, shadows, semitones and, to a lesser extent, even highlights. Gamma describes how the image changes from black to white and affects all the gray in between.

A high gamma, that is, a significant curve, means that a wider range of shadows will be darker. This can make a picture dark and contrasty and obscure the details in the shadows. This is the reason why TV chroniclers often focus on ghost details. A weak gamma has a shallower curve, so the shadows appear brighter. This can make an image look faded and flat.

If this helps you illustrate this, an old HDTVtest article helps clarify things a little bit. Here's how the same image has three different gamma settings:

Low gamma (~ 1.5):

Normal gamma (~ 2.2):

High Gamma (~ 3.0):

I have it? My TV does not even have a gamma setting at adjust, so here it is: I have to stick to the brightness and the backlight, rather than increase the gamma, to be able to process TV shows or movies too dark.

I think most people are fine if they tune their TVs to a traditional 2.2 gamma, but it 's not unusual to go up to a maximum of 2, 4, if you do not fear the loss of some ghost details, this might not matter if you're We installed your television in your dark geek cave.

Your TV may also have just a small slider that allows you to adjust the gamma on negative or positive amounts. I'll just leave it as default, unless otherwise stated, but playing it is an option if you really need to improve your image for your viewing conditions. This is one of the most shocking options if you are wrong, I found.

Everything else

There are many other settings you can use to enhance the image of your TV. Each TV has a different set of adjustments, so it's hard to give specific advice. Instead, I would strive to make your image as "pure" as possible, which means you have to turn off all the crap your TV is trying to add to the image to "make the best", such as this horrible motion tween, "sport" or "game" modes (unless you really are dealing with a huge delay problem), settings all kinds of boring fading between the darker and lighter scenes), et cetera.

For suggestions regarding your specific TV, I like to take a look at the calibration settings on RTings.com, usually found as part of their reviews for your TV. You can also browse avsforum to see if anyone has any suggestions for your setup or, at least, to give you an idea of ​​the settings to use. absolutely turn on or off.

But most of all, patience is probably your best weapon. If you're releasing new episodes of a dimly-lit show from the web (coughing cough Game of Thrones), the darker scenes will probably look pixellated and crappy because of compression. Unlike what Game of thrones the director of photography, Fabian Wagner, must say that it's not your fault. I mean, it's not one hundred percent your fault, assuming that you have done the minimum necessary for the image of your TV is not zero. This should at least calm you down until the best Blu-ray of this dimly lit episode arrives.

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