A handy guide to optimising your TV viewing experience

Tweaking some basic controls can elevate your TV viewing experience
Representative image
Representative image

We are all back to watching The Wheel of Time or the Professor planning his next heist. Did you spend the last weekend over the riveting South Africa vs. India match? Conference calls on Zoom or school classes on Meet, TV is one of the most versatile pieces of technology in use these days.

Have you given a thought about its settings? Are they optimised enough?
Some of the basic parameters for the best picture quality are brightness, backlight, contrast, sharpness, colour and they depend on the size of and light in your room, if you watch it in the day or night. If the backlight is too high, it can strain your eye and if the contrast is too low, it may flatten the scene. This is not how the film director or the video game maker wants you to experience their creations. Kunal Bhuwania, a businessman and gadget enthusiast from Bengaluru, shares, “Make sure there are no light fittings on the wall of the mounted TV. These TVs have mirror screens and they will reflect light from the opposite wall too. Ensure these details work in your favour.”

He also suggests having your devices connected via cable/wire to the TV as opposed to wirelessly as that could create a lag and compromise picture quality. “Use HDMI cable to connect OTT devices. The interference will be less. If you want to take the experience to another level and budget is not a constraint, a good home theatre system with surround sound, sub-woofers etc. will enhance the overall experience,”
he concludes.

Rishabh Giria, Director, Giria’s, a chain of electronics stores across Karnataka, says, “Earlier we used to send technicians home for setting up the TV and they would make the best settings. People generally did not tinker with those. These days the latest sets come with sensitive settings which change according to ambient lighting.” He believes it’s a personal preference whether the viewer prefers a greenish tint or a reddish tint. “There are pre-set modes in every set. Use cinema mode for movies and sports mode for those who are seriously into sports. Cinema mode makes it brighter and sports mode makes it more vibrant. In my experience, 80 per cent of our customers don’t tinker with the setting.” The newer TVs come with factory settings that are calibrated. If you are a techie and have specific uses or own one of the older sets where default settings may not be optimised, you may need to tinker a bit.

Here’s what you need to do

-Tune the OLED light to what suits you best. The brighter the TV, the more energy it will consume. Remember, brighter rooms call for a higher setting and night-time viewing calls for a lower setting.

-Use the contrast option to get details from clouds and snow

-Colour and tint control the red and green shift

-White balance: switch it to warm colour temperature

-Game mode reduces input lag

-Positioning/angle will profoundly impact the viewing experience.

-It is best kept at eye-level

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