Tuning your colour setting, or saturation, has a drastic effect on overall display quality. When there's too much colour, the image looks garish and unrealistic. This distortion is most obvious with reds, which are often accentuated or pushed by the television's colour decoder. If there is too little colour, the picture appears drab and muted. Setting the colour to zero results in a completely black-and-white image. Before you start fiddling with the colour, find your LCD's colour-temperature control. This important feature affects the set's entire palette of hues. Select the Warm or low option. If the picture looks too red for your taste, try the medium setting, although that often gives results that are too blue.

Raise the colour control all the way, then ease it down to the most accurate level.

Now find an image of someone with light, delicate skin tones, preferably a close-up of a face, on a DVD. Turn up the colour control until it looks like the person has terrible sunburn, then reduce it until the skin looks natural, without too much red. If the rest of the colours look washed out, you can turn the colour up slightly at the expense of accurate skin tones.

Tip

Generally, DVD images are best when proprietary processing modes such as autocolour, auto flesh tone, autocontrast, and noise reduction are turned off.