Unwrapped: Tips and tricks for your new TV

If you're lucky enough to unwrap a new HDTV this holiday season, make sure you've made these three lighting adjustments before settling down with your favourite movie.

Tip 1: Make mood lighting
Tip 2: Adjust your picture controls
Tip 3: Replace a dim bulb

Tip 1: Make mood lighting
Everyone wants the movie theatre experience at home, and the best way to achieve that is through controlled lighting. You may be tempted to watch movies in complete darkness, but unless you have a big-screen projector or are sitting at the minimum optimal viewing distance, this can cause eyestrain.

For bright plasmas and smaller, direct-view sets, the ideal setup is to place a dim light directly behind the TV and leave the rest of the room dark. Look for special "daylight" bulbs that glow at 6,500 degrees Kelvin. You also should prevent any light in the room from reflecting off the TV, as glare will hamper image fidelity. Watching at night is best, but if you watch during the day, thick curtains will really improve the picture.

Before you make any picture adjustments (colour, saturation, tint, and so forth), always set the room lighting. For viewing in brighter environments, try the HDTV presets, such as Standard, Sports, or Vivid, and reserve the custom settings for when there is optimal lighting.

Tip 2: Adjust your picture controls
Calibrating your HDTV for the best possible picture can be simple, if you know what to look for.

Brightness or black level: This adjusts how dark the black sections of the picture appear. To set it, connect your DVD player using the highest quality input available. Insert a widescreen DVD (black bars on the top and bottom, also called letterbox bars). Turn up the control all the way, then decrease it until the letterbox bars begin to appear black, as opposed to dark gray. If you notice a loss of shadow detail -- for example, when people's eyes disappear into the depths under their brows -- then you've set brightness too low.

Contrast, picture, or white level: This controls the intensity of the whites and determines the overall light output of the display. To calibrate, display a still image from a DVD of a white object with some visible details, such a white button-up shirt. Adjust the control up all the way, and then reduce it until you can make out all the details in the white, such as the shirt buttons or wrinkles. In general, TVs look best when contrast is set between 30 and 50 percent.

Colour or saturation: This controls the colour intensity. To fine-tune the colour, find an image of someone with light, delicate skin tones, preferably a closeup of a face, on a DVD. Turn up the colour control until it looks as if the person has sunburn, and then reduce it until the skin looks natural, without too much red. When there's too much colour, the set looks garish and unrealistic. On the other hand, too little colour diminishes the impact of the picture, making it look drab. Setting colour to zero results in a black-and-white image.

Many sets today come with picture "enhancements" such as autocolour and noise reduction. Because DVD offers high-quality images, these auto adjustments often do more harm than good. Be sure to turn them off, if possible.

Tip 3: Replace a dim bulb
So you plunked down the big bucks for an LCD or DLP HDTV, and after one year of high-def bliss, the picture is starting to lose its brightness. No, your eyes haven't been damaged from sitting too close to the tube -- the set's bulb needs replacing.

For most LCD or DLP sets, the bulb can last for as few as 500 hours or as many as 8,000 hours, all depending on how you care for them, your viewing habits, and manufacturer quality (and you thought that sub-AU$2,000 set was a deal!). That's six months to six years, provided you watch three hours of television per day, before the bulb starts to dim.

Replacement lamps can be costly, often more than AU$500. And a bulb is an item you should be wary of ordering on the Internet. Though it may be cheaper, bulbs are as fragile as light bulbs and can easily break in the mail.

Installation should be simple to do yourself (often only a screwdriver is required), but that is a big should. Be sure to check into the specific set's procedure with the dealer before laying down the cash.