How to Choose a TV

Whenever you decide to make a big-ticket purchase of home-theater equipment, there are many traps to fall into. There’s the angst of studying reviews: Which reviewer to trust? How important are those technical specs? What’s the consensus on the online A/V forums? Why does everyone disagree?

Once you’ve arrived at a short list, other questions arise: Is this the right brand? How reliable will it be? Does the dealer service the product? Do I really want to spend that much? If I move up one level of quality, will it be worth it? And despite the dropping dollar, equipment seems to get cheaper every week -- should I wait?

On top of that, you have to make decisions about technologies. Those poor folks who went with HD DVD as their high-definition video format know firsthand the cost of making the wrong decision. So what to do with the least fathomable component of home theater -- the TV itself? DLP, D-ILA, LCD, plasma, or CRT? 1080p or 720p? Rear projector, front projector, or flat panel?

So many questions -- and I’m sure you have some of your own. Usually, I’ll go through all these questions, trying to intellectually assault the problems until I come up with a clear winner. But that’s when analysis paralysis can set in.

I can’t relieve you of the task of grappling with these questions for yourself. I can’t tell you which technology is "the best," or which you should buy. What I can do is explain how to compare the picture quality of video displays. This time, I decided to make my life easier by going to Best Buy and picking the TV that displayed the best-looking image. It was the most relaxing purchase of a home theater product I’ve ever made.

First, I’ll get my own biases out of the way. I chose a D-ILA front projector display because it was the best picture I’d seen in my theater. In the rest of the house I have LCD flat panels -- yes, they have artifacts on sports, but most of what I watch on them is news programs. I wanted 24" and 30" TVs to fit particular spaces, and LCDs were the only flat screens available in those sizes. All I had to do was pick a brand.

The biggest problem in trying to evaluate a TV’s picture in the store is that manufacturers send their sets out into the world with their Color, Brightness, and Contrast settings jacked up to the max. They want to make sure that if that a unit ends up on a showroom floor, it will produce the brightest picture. Ever wonder why the stores show so many animated films? Because they look great with all the controls set to 11. The only problem with all this is you will never watch the TV in that state.

It’s impossible to take a good setup disc with you and go though a complete retuning of all the models on your list, but there are some tricks you can use to get 95% of the benefit of a careful calibration at home.

The first order of business is to find the models you’re interested in and try to get the showroom samples placed as close together as you can. Even big-box electronics stores are usually willing to move a few TVs around if they sense an impending sale. The next step is to adjust each set’s controls. Don’t worry about upsetting the salespeople -- if you make it clear that you’re a serious buyer, they’ll probably stand there with you and wonder how you know so much.

The process is not difficult. Get each display’s remote control and check to see if the TV has some sort of automatic picture setting. If it does, turn it off. Then turn any Sharpness controls to their lowest settings. Set the Color control to its lowest level, so that the picture is now black-and-white. If you’ve done this and you still see a color image, you’ve missed the automatic picture setting, so go back, find it, and turn it off. Adjust the Brightness control to its highest setting, and Contrast to its lowest. You should now see a washed-out black-and-white picture.

Find a scene in which someone is wearing dark clothes, and begin decreasing the brightness until the folds in the clothing disappear. Slowly increase the Brightness setting until the folds are just barely visible, then set Brightness one notch above that level.

Slowly begin to increase the Contrast level. When the picture just begins to look better, stop. Look for a white area on the screen, then begin raising the Contrast level again, until the white area starts to bloom (this will look like a kid’s coloring book: whites and colors aren’t contained within the lines). With some sets, the Contrast control can be set to its highest level without the image ever blooming, but if it does bloom, you need to know where. Once you hit that point, back down the Contrast setting a couple notches. If your set never blooms, start backing down the Contrast from the highest setting, until it looks like real life (not like all the other TVs in the store, which will be set incorrectly).

Now you’re ready to set the Color level. Slowly increase this setting, watching reds for blooming. Looking at skin tones, shoot for a realistic look. If the image starts to bloom, back off a few steps. Otherwise, try to get it as close to realistic as possible.

Finally, increase the Sharpness level until you start to see noise around the edges of inanimate objects, then back it down until the noise goes away.

I strongly recommend practicing at home at first, until you can accomplish a full setup in a few minutes. Then go to the store and do the same for all the TVs you’re considering. Once that’s done, you’ve established a level playing field on which to compare them. Here’s what to look for.

All of the TVs should be showing the same image. Most stores use a single central video feed, so this should be easy to do. Which image is the clearest? Which has the best, most natural color? Does one set’s picture have a subtle red, green, or blue tint? If so, scratch that model off your list. Try to watch a sporting event and see which set best handles quickly moving objects and people. Do you see any blocking, or trails of light following a moving person or thing? Does the set lose focus when a camera pans across a scene? Those sets, too, should be disqualified.

Let’s say you’ve narrowed the field to two or three TVs that produce pretty much the same high quality of image. How to break the tie? Think about the other things that are important to you and whoever is sharing your house. For me, it was looks, brand reputation, sound quality, types of inputs, and cost, in that order. You may have different priorities, but by now a clear winner should have emerged.

Because a room’s ambient light will hugely affect any TV’s image, when you get your new TV home it will require completely different settings of the Color, Contrast, Brightness, and Sharpness controls. If your TV includes preset memory storage, you should store separate settings for daytime viewing, night viewing with low lighting, and night viewing with no lighting. Get a setup DVD to help you do this. Joe Kane’s Digital Video Essentials ($25) is easy to use and works well. Monster Cable makes HDTV Calibration Wizard ($30), and Avia II ($50) has almost everything you could ask for. If you spend more than $1000 on your display, you might want to hire an ISF-certified technician to fully calibrate it. That costs about $275 for a flat panel or rear projector, $400 for a front projector. But if you have a CRT, be prepared to get a second mortgage to cover the cost of its complex calibration.

Steve Martin said, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture." Ditto for reading about a TV’s picture. But if you’ve followed these directions, you’ve done it right: You gave all the competing sets a level playing field, you used your eyes, and you picked the best one. Bye-bye, buyer’s remorse. Enjoy your new TV.

…Wes Marshall
wesm@soundstageav.com

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