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do you tinker with your TV/Monitor settings compulsively?

I was never satisfied with the first few HDTV's I had to deal with, constantly fiddled, pointlessly so since they just weren't very good television's. There's just so many duds out there, and then you have input lag to worry about.
 
I've fiddled tons. Although at some point I settle for a good general setting.

I've also fiddled tons with the treble and bass on my sound bar. I found out lowering my my bass way down stops muddling the music.
 
I spent hours researching settings when I bought my new TV thanks to avs forums...Glad I did though, feel like I got the best possible picture for games and movies.
 
Nope, put my PC monitor to sRGB and that's it no other tinkering. Switched on Game mode on my Sony 50" kdl-w805b and that's it.
 
Calibration with disc when I get new display, and every time I update my display drivers.
Sometimes they mess up the colours and black levels so I like to make sure.
 
Buy a colorimeter. Set correctly for light conditions (and seating if viewing angles are small)
Never bother unless the display starts drifting in which case you should probably replace it.
 
I calibrated my S27A850T once and messed around a little to make it fit my own eye the best.
My TV is so old no point messing with it, but usually when I get new TV/Monitor I spend lot of time with the settings before I get bored.
 
A lot of times either games aren't designed well for the full color space, or videos aren't recorded in the full color space, so if I notice that I'll often jump in the settings and set the blacks to cut off so that the lower 16 turn pure black, since otherwise they just would have been a dark grey.

I know playing through MGS2 this was an issue, where the brightness had to be lowered such that everything below the lower 8 would turn black, otherwise it would be totally washed out.
 
I just find that it takes away from my enjoyment a bit. I'm constantly chasing this holy grail of settings for my panel and I'm never 100% happy with it. Sometimes I find myself fiddling with settings while playing a game, pausing it here and there to adjust, and at that point I feel like its a little nuts.
 
Always Be Calibrating!

The first two weeks after getting a new monitor or TV are absolute hell due to all the tinkering. These days I just look up the model number of whatever I have and see what other people have used. There are also various programs that will load custom colour profiles in Windows upon launch.
 
Cannon Goose said:
Always Be Calibrating!

The first two weeks after getting a new monitor or TV are absolute hell due to all the tinkering. These days I just look up the model number of whatever I have and see what other people have used. There are also various programs that will load custom colour profiles in Windows upon launch.
Click to expand...

#1. Fantastic avatar

#2. If you're talking monitors, I recently got a Spyder4 express and it did a really great job. It was really simple and took a matter of minutes to create a custom profile. The downside is that I spend $60 on it, used it once and now its sitting there doing nothing lol.
 
I calibrate TV's with the AVS 709 disc and set monitors to sRGB whenever I can and I'm done with it.

It's the closest we can get without proper hardware calibration
 
Is there anything a calibration disc has over http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/?

I used to tinker with monitors and TVs a lot until I came up with some universal guidelines that tend to work well.
  • Minimize the brightness without crushing the blacks.
  • Maximize the contrast without crushing the whites.
  • Adjust the color to get maximum color without crushing/distorting them.
  • Set gamma to 2.2.
  • Set sharpness to neutral.
  • Set white balance to warm, leave everything else alone.
  • Disable all dynamic whatevers.
In other words if it displays the entire unaltered input signal then it's fine by me. It's probably oversaturated but w/e.
 
Lockjaw333 said:
#2. If you're talking monitors, I recently got a Spyder4 express and it did a really great job. It was really simple and took a matter of minutes to create a custom profile. The downside is that I spend $60 on it, used it once and now its sitting there doing nothing lol.
Click to expand...
Still cheaper than paying someone to do it for you.
 
shockdude said:
Is there anything a calibration disc has over http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/?
Click to expand...

No, not really. The lagom site is one of my favorites, I go there a lot to excercise my settings OCD. The only thing that site is lacking is a way to calibrate color, where a disc will have color bars you can use with a blue filter to set color properly.

The black level pattern on that site is particularly nice.

Anyway, I see a lot of people are "set and forget" types and I wish I could be that why. At this point I hate obsessing over this stuff and would rather just not care anymore because it does affect my enjoyment with gaming and TV watching sometimes. I need to set it at something and like throw my remote away.
 
Not really OP, I set it up once (in my PC monitor not even that, the image was already good enough) and only tinker with it when I get that odd game that has some really weird issues with colors and stuff.

But thats pretty rare. The last time I had to mess with the settings was when I got AC: Black Flag. The colors where really off, like MC was looking like a red, red, lobster, so I had to change some stuff.

But ever since then, smooth sailing for me lol.
 
My GOD yes. I can't stand doing it but all too often before I start playing I'm fiddling with the settings. I feel ?like I can never get them right. What's funny is that if I think about sitting down to get them right it becomes the last thing I want to do. Lol
 
Only within the first 3-6 months of purchase. I usually settle on something by then.

Thankfully, today's tv/monitor allows us to save multiple profiles. So, I just switch them accordingly.
 
I used a calibration disc once and haven't touched it since. I'm annoyed by the bass buzz in the speaker, though, so I mess with the audio a lot, trying to find the middle ground between no buzz and not sounding like complete and utter crap. I know I need to buy a soundbar, but that isn't a high priority right now in comparison to everything else in life.
 
At first i would literally change the settings manually everytime I played a game, and write down my favorite settings for that game

i finally got too lazy for that, thank god
 
Lockjaw333 said:
The only thing that site is lacking is a way to calibrate color, where a disc will have color bars you can use with a blue filter to set color properly.
Click to expand...
Yeah I figured color calibration was missing. Do you know a website that deals with color calibration?
Edit: Looks like AVS 709 is available in mp4, so I don't need to burn a disc. Will play around with it later.
 
SalsaShark said:
sharpness is with what i struggle the most on tvs. youre supposed to leave it pretty low for games afaik, but sometimes its starts to look like ugly FXAA, but then on games with a lot of shit happening on the screen going too far can look like a mess
Click to expand...

You should find a calibration image for sharpness and crank it up until you see artifacts showing up, then tone it down until they go away.
 
I love my Samsung but it took maybe a year to get the settings to a point where I was happy with them. And I still turn stuff on and off depending on what I'm watching.
 
I just find settings from a website like tweaktv.com and use them. I'm not too picky and they usually look pretty great.
 
No, I found settings I like on my current gaming TV that work for almost everything. If something needs to be adjusted it's usually the gamma or brightness from the game itself.

This is a good place to tell this story though. Back in the PS2 days I would change the color and brightness settings every time I switched between the PS2 and Gamecube because I found one setup looked better to me on most PS2 games that I had, and one setup looked better on most Gamecube games.

Eventually my eyes started playing tricks on me. It seemed as if this green tint was gradually taking over my screen. And then it wasn't my eyes. My TV was turning green. By the end the only thing you could see on that screen was a wall of bright green nothing. I've been afraid of constantly messing with settings on TVs ever since. :l
 
I do and don't

Now that i've gotten older and realize some of the features that have been updated and upgrade its a must.

The bleeding of black colors as well as the game mode options for display lag in my game.
 
I went insane trying to make the colors the same on my 32" LED TV and my 24" IPS monitor.

Then I let it go. Life has been much simpler ever since.
 
Nah, I got me a few test images and calibrated accordingly.
I'm sure the quality could still increase (maybe even quite a bit), but in the time I'd spend to do that, I can play videogames and finally put aside enough money for a decent sound setup, which would be a way more dramatic increase of enjoyment.
 
Nope, tinkered with it for a while with a few test images, got to the perfect settings for me and now I'm just enjoying.
 
When I get a new TV (which is like once a decade) then I fiddle with the settings over and over and over until I finally sort of decide that I like how it looks.
 
Zeyphersan said:
I set it up once with a calibration disc and then force myself to let it go otherwise I'd go insane
Click to expand...
This.

Dragoshi1 said:
I actually just got a new TV yesterday, but I noticed some really bad input lag when I tried playing Smash Bros, my old TV never had that issue.

(It's a Hisense 55inch LED Smart TV, in case anyone wants to help me out real quick)
Click to expand...
Go into the settings and change to Game mode. If there is a PC mode, I've heard that one is even faster. All they do is disable all kinds of picture processing.
 
Ambitious said:
Thank you, I really appreciate this.
Click to expand...

Here's what I got:

Splendid:
Scenery

Color:
Brightness 70
Contrast 80
Saturation 36
Color Temp: User (red green blue: all 100)
Skin Tone: Natural

Image:
Sharpness 40
Trace Free 40
Aspect Full
ASCR On

Eco Mode Off

It is really easy for the colors to get oversaturated, so I keep it at 36. I still don't think the colors are perfect, but they are close.
 
When I get a new tv I pop in a game (usually been a Halo game and I'll pick a level that uses various colors In a day time setting) I'll adjust and mess with settings for a couple hours. Set it to what looks best (under game mode of course, to cut on input lag) and then leave it be.
 
Proper calibration gets rid of the this need. I set my displays to a certain spec and only mess with similar settings via something like sweet fx or gpu control panel.
 
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