Five Easy Ways to Improve Your TV's Picture

These simple but easily overlooked steps can help you fine-tune your high-definition viewing experience, and save you from being disappointed with your new HDTV.

1. Correct Your Cables

Use HDMI or Component Cables: HDMI and Component cables provide the best connection between your HDTV and a cable or satellite set-top box. We favor HDMI, as it's digital, and thus completely compatible with the digital HD signal. Component cables are perfectly fine for HD viewing, however because they are analog cables, the digital single is converted to analog, resulting in some loss of quality. Though, such loss may be imperceptible to all but only the most discerning videophiles.

Don't Waste Money on Expensive Cables: Quite often, sales associates at big-box stores like Best Buy or Circuit City will try to convince you that you need expensive HDMI cables from brands like Monster in order to get the best picture quality on your HDTV. That's not entirely true. HDMI is a specification, and any cable that is "HDMI Certified" will perform up to the standards laid out for the format. Look for the certification logo on the package.

We steer people away from Monster brand cables for a number of reasons. For most people, it's overkill. Actual differences in picture quality will be negligible. Perfectly adequate cables can be found online at sites like Monoprice.com for a fraction of the cost.

In certain cases, Monster cables might be advisable, for instance, if you're running cable through a wall and don't want to yank it all out in order to upgrade in the future, or if you require extra-durable and extra-long lengths of cable. If you're just looking for a 6 ft. HDMI cable to go right from your set-top box to your TV, we suggest you go for the low-cost alternative.

2. Play With the Picture Settings

This one is really easy to overlook, and yet it's such a simple thing. Dig around your HDTV's menu and look for the picture settings: brightness, contrast, sharpness, color, and tint. When you pull the TV out of the box, it's not configured to look good in your home, it's configured to look good on a retail store's showroom floor. That means that the brightness and sharpness is dialed way up. If the TV has an auto-picture mode, it will most likely be set to 'Vivid' or 'Dynamic.' Mess around with the settings until the picture looks good to you.

3. Be Careful With Stretching and Zooming

As we're still in an awkward transitional period between standard-definition programming and high-definition TV, chances are you'll be bouncing back and forth between HD and SD TV shows. When you watch SDTV on an HDTV, you'll see tall vertical black pillars appear on the sides of the screen. This occurs because SDTV has a square 4:3 aspect ratio, while HDTV has a rectangular 16:9 aspect ratio. A lot of people find this irritating, and use their HDTV's stretching and zooming features to eliminate that black space by making the square 4:3 picture fill the whole screen.

The downside is that with stretching, the picture gets all warped and strange looking. People on TV appear unusually short and stocky, and the stretching highlights the poor image quality of SDTV. Zooming cuts off a significant portion of the image so you miss out on the top and bottom parts of the TV show, and also makes the poor quality of SDTV more noticable.

If you absolutely have to watch SDTV, it's probably best to avoid stretching or zooming in most cases. The picture will be small, but at least it will look good. Also, you avoid the risk of forgetting to turn the stretch or zoom function off, which can really mess you up when you turn back to HD channels.

4. Configure Your Room Properly

How you arrange your room plays a big role in how your TV's picture looks. Make sure your HDTV is positioned away from direct light, as glare and ambient light can affect the TV's ability to adequately display the color black. Make sure you're sitting at a distance that is at least 2.5 times the diagonally measured size of the display. For more information on this, check out our other guide, Sizing Up Your New TV

5. Upgrade Your DVD Player

If you feel like your DVDs are looking a little lackluster, there are somethings you can do to ensure that your old standard-definition DVDs won't disappoint.

If you want to stick with your old collection, an up-scaling DVD player like the Oppo DV-950H would be a good choice. It's a simple DVD player that compensates for the difference in resolution between DVDs and your HDTV. It won't make your old DVDs look as precisely as good as HD, but it'll come as close as possible. It also features and HDMI port for connecting it to your HDTV, something older DVD players lack.

The other option is going for a high-definition disc player. HD-DVD is officially out of the race, so that leaves Blu-Ray as your only option for HD video. A Blu-Ray disc player will not only give you access to fully-HD movies, it will also up-scale your old DVDs like the Oppo. The difference is in the price. A Blu-Ray player will cost between $400 and $600, while the Oppo only costs $150.