You Asked: debunking TV calibration myths, and are TVs too bright?

Each week, we'll hand pick some of the most commonly asked questions and answer them as concisely and helpfully as we know how.

On today’s You Asked: Busting the myths about TV calibration, and are TV brands trying to blind us with brightness?

Is TV calibration worth the price?

Kevin Gallagher writes that he’s looking into getting a Sony Bravia 9 from a company that also provides a QA — quality assurance — and calibration service, but he feels it’s kind of pricey. Kevin is concerned the calibration could dim the TV down or otherwise sap the TV of its magic, which he enjoys on two other Sony TVs he already owns. He wonders if that’s a fair worry, or if he’s overthinking things. 

First, I just want to acknowledge that this is a fair concern. I can imagine being on the internet, researching TVs, and seeing many videos and forum posts. On one side you have folks swearing by calibrations. On the other you have folks talking about how calibrating a TV sucks the life out of the picture. You might even see people proclaiming they wish they’d never spent the money. Even understanding that what is “best” for one person may not be the best for another makes it hard to reconcile such strong feelings or polar opposite sides of a topic. I’ll speak to that. But first I want to address the QA portion of the service.

When a retailer sells you a new TV, you’re expecting a factory-fresh, factory-sealed television that has not been messed with by anyone. If it has been opened and in any way altered — and I mean something as minimal as taking the plastic off the remote, or opening the supplied batteries for the remote — the TV should be sold as an open-box unit and come with some kind of discount.

The problem with getting a factory-fresh TV is that it’s a little like playing the lottery. (Though it’s a lottery in which the odds are much more in your favor than if you’re trying to win Powerball.) There’s a much better chance that the TV inside the box is going to be in good shape and offer good performance than there is a chance that you’re going to win a million dollars at the 7-Eleven.

Still, a lot can happen to a TV between the moment it is packed into its box at the factory and when it lands at your doorstep. There can be shipping damage, even with no obvious signs of trauma from the box. So, having a professional check the quality and performance of a TV will, at the very least, ensure you aren’t going to have a devastatingly disappointing moment at home when you unbox the TV, set it up, and turn it on, only to find out part of the screen took a hit and it’s all messed up.

But a QA service offers even more value than that. The quality checks performed by a manufacturer only go so far, and their standards are often not as high as the standards of a professional service. They check to make sure you don’t have any dead pixels, that the panel uniformity is good enough, that there’s no excessive banding — things of that nature. In other words, they are taking the time to ensure that the TV that lands in your living room won’t be a disappointment. It’s kind of like insurance for making sure you’ll be happy with your purchase. It is not, however, a promise that you will get a perfect TV. Because at the end of the day, retailers can’t return units that still perform within a manufacturer’s specs. So, you’ll be assured not to get a dud TV, but you aren’t promised a perfect TV. I think that counts for a lot. So don’t discount the QA service when considering whether the price being charged is worth paying.

As for the worry that calibration may suck the life out of the picture, understand that a good calibrator’s chief goal is to make their customer happy. If the customer wants reference-grade accuracy, the calibrator needs to make that happen. And accuracy is not some nebulous concept open to interpretation. It is all measurable and adheres to standards. For example: The white point of the TV should measure at D65. The grayscale should have the proper balance of red, green, and blue across 20 points of brightness. The colors should land at certain coordinates on the CIE color chart, and they should also be of a certain brightness, depending on the instructions of a video signal. The average picture level of the TV (or APL) should be at a certain number for SDR. All of this is done in service of making the picture accurately represent what the content was made to look like. The idea is that calibration will get a TV to mimic as closely as possible the expensive reference monitors used by professional creators.

That is what a strict calibration for a professional client involves. However, a strict calibration standard also assumes the TV will always be operating in a dark room, which is rarely the case for most people. It also assumes strict accuracy is the primary goal, which is not necessarily the goal for most viewers.

It is also possible to tell your calibrator: “Look, I do want an accurate white point. I do want accurate colors. I do want accurate grayscale. But I don’t want my TV to be super dim in SDR. I want it to be really bright.” Or you may say, “I really want color brightness to be juiced a bit. I want the colors to be accurate on the color chart, but I’m OK with them being brighter than they ‘should’ be. I want the picture to really pop. Can you please make sure my TV does that for me?”

In that case, the calibrator can still make some valuable adjustments to yield accuracy, but they can also abandon the standard in favor of your preferences. This way, you get a nice blend of accuracy and preference.

When you get a really high-end TV, often the presets for cinema, professional, or movie modes for SDR and HDR are really close to accurate. Sometimes Dolby Vision Bright is just a couple of tweaks away from being super accurate and doesn’t need a ton of help because the factory did such a great job making the TV accurate out of the box. That’s why in my reviews I try to talk about how close the TV is to properly calibrated right out of the box, in an effort to help folks understand whether they may still want to pay for a calibration, or if they will probably be satisfied with what the TV can do without that professional service.

With all of that said, don’t forget that calibration is not forever! You can undo it with the press of a button if you restore the TV to its factory settings. Or, just change the picture mode, so you have an accurate mode, and you have one that’s a little more punchy! On a Sony TV, the Professional preset can be calibrated to accuracy, while the Cinema preset can be something more punchy and exhilarating. It’s not as if once your TV is calibrated, it’s locked in and there’s no going back. Also, I think a lot of calibrators would be willing to print out the settings they made so that if you ever needed to put them back in, you could.

Getting a TV calibrated doesn’t strip you of options. If anything, it gives you more options. It helps you get what you want, not what someone else thinks you should want.

Why do we need all 4,000-plus nits of brightness?

Jimster481 writes: This is the most wild thing I’ve ever seen. A TV with 4,000 NITS? What will anyone do with that? Are you going to try to watch movies in full sunlight outside? I have a 2020 Sony Master 8 OLED and it hits like 900 nits peak and it is way too bright in HDR mode. We don’t even use full brightness in SDR especially when watching at night (we have the sensor on to adjust brightness). What would anyone do with 2,000 — let alone 4,000 or 6,000 — nits?

I understand this … misunderstanding … all about TV brightness. We see a peak brightness number like 500, 1,000, or 2,000 nits, and we correlate that to the brightness of a display that we have experience with and we think it is absolute madness that anyone would ever want or need anything brighter. I get that. But that premise is based on one big misunderstanding.

When we talk about brightness on a display, there’s average picture level, and then there’s HDR highlight brightness.

Average picture level describes what most people understand to be what makes a display bright. It’s the average level of brightness given all the various different brightnesses of the scenes we see on our displays. The average picture level of some shows tends to be high, while the average picture level of others may tend to be quite low. House of the Dragon is a dark show with low APL. The Price is Right, on the other hand, is a very bright show. (And has way fewer dragons.)

And, you’re right … you do not need the average picture level of a show like The Price is Right to be up in the 2,000-nit or even 1,000-nit territory. In fact, most folks like SDR content like game shows and sitcoms to be right in the 300-nit range. That’s plenty bright for a show’s APL.

When we talk about how exciting the brightness numbers on a TV are when they can hit 2,000, 4,000, or 6,000 nits, we’re not talking about the TV’s capability of making The Price is Right so eye-searingly bright that you wouldn’t want to watch it. Can the TV do that with its brightness power? Yes, it can make everyday viewing painful if you ask it to. But that’s not what that brightness power is there for. That brightness power is headroom — it’s horsepower in reserve to be used in very specific situations to enhance the viewing experience with realism and sparkle.

What you want that brightness for is for very tiny elements on the screen. We call them specular highlights. It’s the glint of the sun off the corner of a chrome bumper on a car — and it may only take up a tiny half-inch circle of diameter on your 65-inch screen. It’s the sheen coming off a piece of fruit. It’s the intensity of the holiday lights on a tree in the background of a scene in a living room. Tiny little areas that, when made very bright, don’t hurt your eyes or blind you — they make the image pop and add realism. That is what that high brightness power enables.

Also, remember that bright white light affects us differently than a really bright shade of, say, green, for example. Different wavelengths of light at super high brightness aren’t blinding, they are just exciting. So a 2,000-nit white 2% window might blind you. But a 2,000-nit green 2% window would just look cool. It wouldn’t blind you at all.

I hope that helps clear things up.