Ok, you’ve gone out and purchased a brand spanking new plasma TV, but how do you make sure that you’re getting the best picture out of it? To do that you need to adjust the picture settings on your plasma TV, other than as supposed or expected known as “plasma calibration” in the AV industry.

Before you start, you will have to know that the best calibration for your plasma TV will depend on your source material (i.e. what you’re watching), your input device (e.g. DVD player or satellite box) and the amount of ambient light in your home environment… amidst other things. You must also be conscious that your plasma TV needs to be run in for at least 200 hours to grant the phosphors to stabilize, or else you will have to repeat your plasma TV calibration in the future.

You may not own a plasma TV calibration DVD, so this article will undertake to walk you through the steps using readily available material. Remember to use the best available connection to connect your input device to your plasma TV. In descending order, the cleanest signal (and accordingly best picture quality) may be received via: HDMI = DVI > VGA = factor > SCART (RGB) > S-Video > Composite.

1. Adjust Brightness. This genuinely determines the black level on your plasma TV: too high a setting and black will look gray; too low and dark grays are swallowed into blackness. To set luminance to it is proper level, merely play a DVD with a large total of black scenes (e.g. opening scene from Star Wars). Now crank your luminance up until the black on your plasma TV look gray, then tardily dial your luminance down until the black in the movie JUST matches the black on the black bars on top and bottom of the movie.

2. Adjust Contrast. This determines the white level and is responsible for how much light your plasma TV actually emits. To set contrast correctly, play a DVD scene containing a shiny bald head/forehead (e.g. The Fifth Element). Now increase contrast until the bald patch is glaringly hurting your eyes, and then tone it down until you’re satisfied that you may see all the detail within the white.

3. Adjust Sharpness. For most poorly-encoded source material you want to use this to heighten the edges, but if done excessively this will introduce haloing and ringing around edges. It’s best to fetch up a “User Menu” (from your DVD, satellite box, etc) to adjust sharpness: increase it until lots of ringing artifacts take place around the edges of the words, then decrease it until the ringing just disappears.

4. Adjust Color. Color may either be too completely filled or too dull… either way the picture will not look right, with the most noticeable errors found in skin tones and green foliage. As a rough guide, you may use a DVD scene with a hand and tinker with the color until the color matches that of your own hand.

What I’ve described above is 4 basic steps for plasma calibration using only what’s available to you. If you wish to strive for more accuracy you may get a HDTV calibration DVD, but you’ll need to know which one to buy and how to use it to calibrate plasma TV because the majority of them are still catered for the CRT market.

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