Enriching Your TV Picture, From the Couch IF you are close to spending thousands of dollars on a TV because you want a better picture, you may want to save your money. You can almost certainly make your TV's picture look better than it did when the set was brand-new, and doing so is relatively easy. Virtually every mass-produced TV is set by default to stand out in a store display. That means TVs come out of the box with the picture set to be bright, with overly saturated colors and digital sharpening. Kevin Miller, a consultant to several TV manufacturers, calls it the "Best Buy Torch Mode." The manufacturers, Mr. Miller said, do not know "if their set is going to be on a wall with 45 other TVs in a Best Buy or a consumer's home." In your darkened living room, though, that bright screen is painful to watch. But the bright screen and many other TV ills can be fixed for nothing by changing a few settings. You can improve your TV's picture even more if you are willing to spend a few dollars for test discs, or make it nearly perfect by hiring a professional to calibrate your set. BASIC SETTINGS The most obvious fix is to turn off Torch Mode. That may require doing something many people loathe - consult the owner's manual. But it could come in handy. Then find your TV's menus. Look for an option named something like "screen settings" or "modes" (manufacturers use different names). Under screen settings, you should see options like Vivid, Games, Sports and Cinema. The truest picture generally comes from the setting with a name like Movie, Cinema or Theater. Those settings give the picture a more filmlike appearance. The THX setting usually gets you closest to movie-theater style. If you want to go a step further, you can change the modes to suit what you are watching at the time. "Put it in Sports mode when you watch sports, Game mode when you play games," said Josh Kairoff, who was the director of display engineering for Pioneer. If you watch sports in Movie mode, it isn't going to look that good. If you don't want to constantly change settings, stick with the one for the kind of viewing you do most often, and test the picture at the time of day you watch most often. Room light makes a big difference in which looks best. Mr. Kairoff said that choosing one setting was often a decent compromise. "Nothing will look as good as it could," he said, "but nothing will look as bad as it might." Televisions commonly get shipped set to "overscan" or "zoom," which enlarges the picture and can cut off the edges. The overscan feature is meant to hide errors that sometimes show up in broadcasts as a flickering white line on the edge of a full-screen picture. When you overscan, you reduce the number of lines of resolution and degrade your picture. Instead, set the TV to Full. "If you do not do this, you are not getting high definition," said Joel Silver, founder of the Imaging Science Foundation, which trains professionals to calibrate TVs. You could be losing 30 percent or more of your resolution. You have to check the settings on your cable or satellite box and DVD player as well. "The dirtiest little secret is the people who are paying for HD and are getting 480P," Mr. Silver said. Thirty percent of the homes we see are watching standard definition. It's a scandal. BETTER CABLES Sometimes changing a cable can make a big improvement, but only if the cable you have is really bad. As it happens, the cheap cables that come with TVs are often really bad. In lengths of three feet or less, all you need is a cable that fits snugly in the HDMI slot. But with longer cables, like those over 10 feet, quality becomes important, said Mr. Silver. He said the best cable was called an active cable, which has an amplifier in it. Those don't have to be expensive. The website Monoprice sells Redmere technology cables in a 10-foot length for $17.43. Fancy versions are more than $60. ADVANCED SETTINGS If you are even more adventurous, you can delve into custom settings. You can improve individual adjustments like Color Temperature, Brightness, Tint and Motion Smoother by trial and error, or you can save time by looking at what other people with your model of TV have done. People will post how they have set their TVs on audiovisual forums like avsforum or CNET. Mr. Miller, who calibrates TVs professionally, maintains a website called TweakTV, where he publishes a simplified version of the best settings for each model of TV he has worked on. One word of warning: The THX setting limits how much you can adjust the set. If you want to customize more heavily, you'll have to switch to Cinema or something else. CALIBRATION DISCS If you would rather trust your own eye, there are low-cost calibration discs with video test patterns that help you make the optimal setting for your screen. Perhaps the easiest to use is the HDTV Calibration Wizard from Monster/ISF, the cable manufacturer and Mr. Silver's organization. The $16 disc doesn't come in Blu-ray and has a laughable production quality, and you'll have to sit through some promotional plugs. But it uses simple pictures to help you fine-tune five of the most important settings, including brightness, contrast and aspect. You'll be done in about a half-hour. The Disney WOW (World of Wonder) disc uses test patterns to help you adjust settings, including some of the more advanced ones. There is an easy calibration for beginners, in which a narrator explains each step. That is more than sufficient for a big improvement. Advanced settings let you tune more precisely, but I found it a lot of work for little additional return. The two-disc set, on Blu-ray, is about $25 online. Count on spending an hour or more to set your TV. The latest version of the Spears & Munsil HD Benchmark is a serious set of no-nonsense tools. No elaborate intros, just brief and understandable directions and test screens. With this two-disc set, even the beginner settings are pretty advanced. You won't undertake most advanced settings unless you have an expensive set of calibration tools. The Blu-ray disc set is $30 online. You could amuse yourself for hours tweaking your system with these discs. THE HUMAN ELEMENT Everyone likes a better-looking TV, but not everyone likes to spend hours parsing menus. That is where professional calibrators can come in handy. The experts - there are about 45,000 ISF-trained calibrators in the United States - typically charge $200 to $500 for a consumer TV and can be found on the ISF website. But those experts are rarely needed, except for the most exacting consumers. For the rest of us, the only expertise needed is the patience to sit on the couch and click the remote.