Five common HDTV questions answered | HDTV | Playlist | Macworld: Browse to your HDTV’s video settings and choose either ‘movie’ or ‘film’ mode. In most instances that option provides you with the closest-to-optimal setting for your HDTV. If you like the way that setting looks, keep it there and don’t make any tweaks. But if you think it needs a little something, start modifying some of the individual picture settings, such as brightness, sharpness, and contrast.
Brightness is perhaps better described as “black level.” You’ll want to adjust the brightness on your set until something black on your display has a nice, deep, inky look to it.
Sharpness tends to create odd halos around objects that aren’t coming from the video source. Since you want to create an accurate picture as quickly as possible, it’s generally best to turn sharpness down to zero.
Then, go to the contrast settings (sometimes called “picture”) and turn it down so that white objects on the screen look sharp, have detail, and don’t appear odd. At this point you might also have to return to the brightness setting to ensure that blacks aren’t too dark and you haven’t lost some detail along the way.
You may also find a ‘color’ setting on your HDTV. Since you’re not using any calibration aids, it’s best for now to leave that alone, since most HDTVs deliver relatively accurate color out of the box.