Under harsh fluorescent shop lighting, and against competitor TVs doing exactly the same thing, this looks good (for a certain value of the word good) but it’s not at all representative of what your TV should look like. In stores, TVs are almost always set to a specialised Shop mode that pushes brightness way through the roof, almost always pushing colours - especially blues and reds - to the point of over-saturation and crushing, and throws contrast way off to destroy fine image detail in both highlights and shadowy areas. Straight out of the box, your TV will look OK - standard screen profiles are actually surprisingly decent these days - but a little bit of tweaking in your screen’s picture can go a long way.

The vast majority of TV buyers out there will unpack their new screen, attach its stand and set it up and plug it in, then do… nothing.

So, this is what most of you will probably be doing with your new TV, no matter how expensive it is. It won’t necessarily be brighter or more saturated or sharper, but it will be more accurate in every one of these metrics. After calibrating your screen, you can expect a better picture, but that picture is just one that has more detail in it. But here’s the thing - you’re looking at that on an (almost certainly) uncalibrated screen, so the differences you see aren’t so obvious. Watch the video above for an idea of the difference that calibration can make. You can spend zero dollars on this or you can spend a couple of hundred, but the result that you get will be a noticeable improvement. Either way, the second you set it up, there are a few small tweaks that you can do to make it look better than it already does. Maybe you got a great deal on a really expensive one from your mate at the hi-fi shop. Maybe it’s a cheap one that you picked up at Aldi.

Led tv calibration disc