TV Setup Wizard
Six steps. One setting per step. Go through them in order with your television's picture settings menu open. The wizard tells you what to look for at each stage.
Open your television's picture settings menu and find the Picture Mode or Picture Preset option. Select Cinema, Movie, or the equivalent on your television. Avoid Vivid, Dynamic, or Standard.
What to look for
The image will look noticeably darker and less punchy than Vivid mode. This is correct. Cinema mode is calibrated closer to D65 white balance and uses a gamma appropriate for home viewing. If the room is very bright, it may look dim — but dim in Cinema mode is more accurate than bright in Vivid mode.
Find the Brightness control. Despite its name, this sets the black floor — the point below which the display clips to pure black. It does not control how bright the overall image appears.
What to look for
Find a scene with a dark environment containing visible shadow detail — a corridor, a night exterior, a scene with a lamp in a dark room. Reduce Brightness until the shadow detail disappears into solid black, then increase it until the detail just reappears. That is the correct calibration point for your room's ambient light level.
Find the Contrast control. This sets the white ceiling — the signal level at which the display clips to maximum brightness. Setting it too high loses highlight detail in bright areas.
What to look for
Find content with a bright white area that should contain texture — a white shirt with visible fabric, a cloudy sky, a lit surface with detail. Increase Contrast until the texture disappears into featureless white, then reduce it until the detail just reappears. Leave a small margin below that point.
Find the Sharpness control. This applies edge enhancement — artificial contrast at borders between image areas. For high-resolution source content it adds nothing real and often introduces visible artefacts.
What to look for
Set Sharpness to zero or minimum and observe the image on native 4K or 1080p content. The image should look clean and natural. If it looks soft, increase sharpness by small increments until edges look defined without haloing. For compressed streaming content, a small positive value can improve apparent clarity.
Find Colour Temperature or White Balance. The reference standard for home viewing content is D65 (approximately 6500K). Most televisions label this Warm, Warm 2, or D65 in Cinema mode.
What to look for
Select the warmest colour temperature preset available. White should look neutral — neither bluish nor orange-tinted. Skin tones should appear natural. If Cinema mode was selected in Step 1, the colour temperature is likely already set correctly. Avoid Cool or Standard presets.
Find motion settings — labelled TruMotion, MotionFlow, Auto Motion Plus, or similar. For film and television content, this processing creates an unnatural smoothness known as the soap opera effect.
What to look for
Set to Off or Custom. In Custom mode, set Blur Reduction to minimum or zero and Judder Reduction to a low value (1–2 on a 10-point scale). This reduces judder on slow camera pans without generating synthetic frames. For live sport, moderate motion settings are acceptable. The key difference to observe: a film should look like film, not like live television.
Setup complete
Your television is now configured closer to the reference conditions used in professional production. The image will look darker and more natural than the factory default — this is correct. Use the browser print function to save a summary of these settings.