Do you tinker with your TV picture setting?

[claws]

I'm just curious.

[The Burgomaster]

I generally do when the TV is new, but I don't touch the settings much after that unless I'm watching something where the color seems to be really intense and needs to be turned down a bit or the picture is too dark and needs to be brightened or whatever.  This probably only happens once or twice a year.

[Jack]

When we first got the HDTV, the picture quality was quite a bit different than the old standard def one.  Standard def seems to be much more vibrant looking, with brighter colors and just more brightness overall.  I adjusted the HDTV to look like that, but eventually I got used to the new look and now I just leave it on factory normal settings.  Unless I'm watching a DVD that looks kind of crappy, then I might flip through the factory presets and see if a different one looks better.  Probably do that once or twice a year.

[Mr. DS]

Good God no!  I always end up friggin' it up worse!

[claws]

When we first got the HDTV, the picture quality was quite a bit different than the old standard def one.  Standard def seems to be much more vibrant looking, with brighter colors and just more brightness overall.  I adjusted the HDTV to look like that, but eventually I got used to the new look and now I just leave it on factory normal settings.  Unless I'm watching a DVD that looks kind of crappy, then I might flip through the factory presets and see if a different one looks better.  Probably do that once or twice a year.

I'm a firm believer in factory setting. My LCD is from Toshiba and I'm pretty sure they know their business and optimize to perfection, so I don't bother to tinker with the setting.
I have yet to encounter color bleeding or any other abnormalities, and if a movie has strong colors it was most likely intended to look that way.

If you have a quality TV set and movies still look crappy I'd blame the movies' source. If this happens to be the case I also flip through my HDTV's various viewing options.

[Jack]

If you have a quality TV set and movies still look crappy I'd blame the movies' source. If this happens to be the case I also flip through my HDTV's various viewing options.

Oh yes, I do.  Some of my movies are of extremely questionable origins 

[Trevor]

When my brother gave me a new region free DVD player for my birthday, I had to change ALL my TV's settings. 

[LilCerberus]

Voted "yes", though not so much since they did away with knobs.
I really miss knobs. It was easier to get it just right in just a few moves.
Nowadays, you have go through dozens of menus to find the specific set of submenus & open & close each of them one at at time, or worse, when you get a device that sends you all the way back to the main menu, meaning you have to navigate dozens of submenus for each little tweak.
Boy, do I miss knobs.

[Doc Daneeka]

I would have a lot of fun watching things in black and white if my TV would actually DO black and white settings and not just ultra-faded color :P

[Raffine]

Voted "yes", though not so much since they did away with knobs.
I really miss knobs. It was easier to get it just right in just a few moves.
Nowadays, you have go through dozens of menus to find the specific set of submenus & open & close each of them one at at time, or worse, when you get a device that sends you all the way back to the main menu, meaning you have to navigate dozens of submenus for each little tweak.
Boy, do I miss knobs.

A joy of my childhood was fiddling with the UHF fine tuner and occasionally (when the weather was just right) being able to pick up a distant channel in Chattanooga that showed horror movies late at night.

[claws]

Well, last week I found a professional setting for my TV (not online, but in some German Audio/Video test magazine). As much as I hate to admit it but it really shows a difference, even though the factory setting was only a bit off.
I was advised to tone down color, brightness and sharpness on my set by a few notches and I've been checking and testing my Blu-rays ever since.
All I can say is, wow.
They even look better than ever before, especially those Warner Blu-rays. They don't appear to be 'flat' any more, they now come with "pop" after the tiny adjustments.

Some friends have been praising this site: http://www.tweaktv.com/
Maybe your TV brand is listed. Not sure how professional they are but its worth a shot I guess.

[AndyC]

It's been years since I've felt compelled to use anything other than the default settings on a TV. Today's TVs manage everything pretty well on their own. As a kid, it was much different. We had a 12" 70s-vintage black and white set in the kitchen that seemed to require constant fiddling with the brightness, contrast, fine tuning and antenna direction.

And our main TV, a 23-inch Admiral from the late 60s, could be a demanding piece of machinery. Big wooden piece of furniture, full of vacuum tubes. It had knobs and dials on and under the front console, more sticking out through the back cover, and some that might have required special tools. The thing would occasionally just fall out of adjustment, which I suppose must have been due to the tubes changing their electrical characteristics slightly as they wore out. I don't really know why, but the vertical hold would go and the picture would start rolling, or something else would go wonky and need to be tweaked. Sometimes a good thump in the right spot would do the trick. And about once a year, the time would come when nothing worked, and Mom would call the TV repairman - something else that disappeared along with vacuum tubes (I suppose they switched to working on computers, satellite dishes and car stereos). We had that thing in our rec room (doubling as a space heater ) until the mid-80s, because a colour TV that size was still an expensive thing, and my dad was never one to spend money on luxuries.

I believe ours is the beast in the bottom left-hand corner of this ad - The Lancaster.


Our TV also had that relic of the 70s, a converter box with a wired remote control. This big brown thing with a row of channel buttons, a switch for two channel ranges and a dial for fine tuning, attached to an even bigger box behind the TV by a cable that reached across the room.

Who else had one of these things? This model is slightly fancier and more "modern" looking than the one we had, possibly made later.

[claws]

We didn't have any of that. We got our first (!) remote controlled TV in 1986 though. Fancy set, from Panasonic. Bigger than usual square screen and a somewhat slim design. It came with a matching stand.
Before that we used to have one of those wooden TV monstrosities, similar to the one in Videodrome except ours didn't breath 
Myself had one of those portable black & white TVs in my room, with wires for antenna.

[Mofo Rising]

Pretty much the first thing I do when I get a new piece of electronic equipment is go in and monkey with the settings. With most modern televisions, I notice they have a serious problem in a room lit with sunlight. Until I can afford a dream house with a darkened theater I'm going to have to make do.

I do find that most often, the factory defaults are the best way to go, but they can still stand some tweaking.

The sound settings are the things I find make the most difference. I have a cheap receiver with surround sound, but going in and messing with those settings makes a difference. I tend to like to emphasize the mid-range sounds, which most dialogue falls into. Bass is always tricky to find the right setting. You want a lot of deep bass, but overpowering bass is distracting and can really destroy a good sound mix.

[Umaril The Unfeathered]

Voted "yes", though not so much since they did away with knobs.
I really miss knobs. It was easier to get it just right in just a few moves.
Nowadays, you have go through dozens of menus to find the specific set of submenus & open & close each of them one at at time, or worse, when you get a device that sends you all the way back to the main menu, meaning you have to navigate dozens of submenus for each little tweak.
Boy, do I miss knobs.

A joy of my childhood was fiddling with the UHF fine tuner and occasionally (when the weather was just right) being able to pick up a distant channel in Chattanooga that showed horror movies late at night.

Raffine, you're someone after my own heart    I used to get UHF stations all the time in New Jersey because we used to live high on a hill with a pretty much unobstructed  area.  Add to that the rotary antenna we used to have, spin it to any direction and the UHF world was yours.

But, there were those time you had to fiddle with the UHF knob, and turn it half a click to get a station to come in, and hope that it would stay in that position. 

That used to be a b*tch and a half, but it was well worth it when done right, wasn't it?