No doubt many of you out there have purchased or received home theater over the holidays, or know friends or family members who have. For many newbies out there, you may not know how easy it is to get the most from your new system. A few quick tips can make a world of difference in how your new home theater equipment performs. For those of you who know a bit about home theater you can help your friends and family out with these quick tips.

HD Video Connections
To view HD or progressive-scan DVD sources you need to use a Component or HDMI video connection. For upconverting DVD players, HDMI is the only allowed connection to view the upconverted signal. It may sound obvious to those who know a bit about home theater, but I’ve seen countless friends and family who were connected with video connections other than HDMI or Component and thought they were indeed viewing the HD source.

HDTVs
Many consumers connect their TVs, turn them on, and start watching. Even though the connection process may have been arduous, you simply won’t get as great a picture that your TV offers unless you change a few settings.

First and foremost is to change the picture settings. TVs are setup to sell on the retail floor, and their contrast, brightness and color settings are set high. While this sells TVs in the store, these settings look like absolute crap at home.

Those new to HD may think the picture looks good enough with the default picture setting. This is understandable since once consumers see an HD signal for the first time they’re exposed to signal that is so much better than their previous experience that it can be easy to assume that it can’t get better, but it does.

Most if not all TVs will come pre-setup in a “Vivid” mode. Whatever the default setting is, change the setting selection to something other than the default. If you cycle through the settings you should be able to see dramatic changes in tonal quality, and a reduction in the amount of image noise. These alternate settings may not be as bright as the default mode, and that’s a good thing.

After picking an alternate display setting you can then begin changing the individual settings to tweak the picture more:

• Color: While displaying a source with people and brightly colored hues (such as a newscast) you can change the color setting to display natural colors. People are the best indicator of proper color. You can use red objects to see if your color is too high as well. If red objects smear, have undefined edges, or are unnaturally vibrant, turn the color down until the red objects don’t smear and people look natural.

• Tint: This is a bit harder to get right and you may need to change this setting after you live with the TV for a while. Essentially if you see grey objects tilting green you need to move the tint more towards red. If grey objects take on a brownish hue, then you need to swing the tint toward the green side. If you feel comfortable with more advanced menus, many TVs now let you adjust RGB values independently.

• Brightness and Contrast: These are a bit more suggestive, but if set too high, they will expose or create noise in the image. Swing the brightness and contrast settings until you get a satisfactory bright and smooth image with as little noise as possible. Sources with mountains of snow would be the best test material for this. If you set the brightness and contrast settings to high, light areas become overblown thus removing detail from the picture. The inverse is true with black if you set the brightness and contrast too low.
  
  The goal here is you want deep blacks and natural whites where the settings are calibrated so that no detail is lost to black or white fields.

• Sharpness: Sharpness essentially adds false outlines around objects. While it may take a while to get used to, turn the sharpness all the way down. Eventually you’ll begin to see how smooth the image looks and will notice the false edges sharpness creates on every other TV.

• Calibration DVDs: There are great calibrations DVDs made the allow normal people to calibrate their TVs. These DVDs usually run $40 or can be rented. If you don’t want get into that much complexity, the above guides are good place to start. Many Pixar DVDs also have a “THX Optimizer” included on the disc from which you can do basic calibration.

Receivers
Different levels of receivers have different capabilities. Mid-priced receivers on up can usually do some sort of upconversion of video through component and/or HDMI connections so you can use the receiver as the A/V switcher and simply leave your TV set to one or two inputs.

You can figure out your connection options by reading through the receiver’s manual. The manufacturer will likely give you a few suggestions or guides. The trick is not to look at the back of the receiver connections altogether, but rather as a way of connecting individual speakers and individual components. That way you only need to focus on one connection at a time.

The hardest thing for anyone new to home theater to do is setup an A/V receiver. Consumers are most likely to use a 5.1 speaker setup while many new receivers come with a 7.1 or 8.1 speaker capability. Getting the right sound requires you to tell the receiver how many speakers you have, what size they are, and what inputs you want to use digital audio connections.

Many, receivers can be setup via an onscreen interface, but in order to do this a video connection must be made from the receiver to the TV. More affordable receivers may lack an onscreen setup and are instead setup via their front panel display. Whether on-screen or front panel, these menus can be a bit quirky so it’s a good idea to have the manual handy as you go through each setup screen. The manual will tell you can do on each screen and can guide you through the whole process. It may seem difficult at first but once you go through the menus a few times it get easier.

DVD Players
Video connection issues for upconverting or progressive-scan DVD players were covered at the beginning of this article.

For audio connections make sure to use the digital audio connection whenever possible. If you’re using a receiver, the digital audio connection is the only way to hear Digital Surround formats. Otherwise you’re only getting stereo sound from which receivers can use a matrixed surround sound format such as Dolby Pro-Logic. Digital Surround offers much better sound.

With a progressive-scan DVD player use the DVD player’s menu to set the format of your TV screen. Some progressive-scan DVD players come with progressive-scan turned off. To fix this find the menu or remote option to switch to progressive-scan.

Summary
Hopefully these few quick tips can get you on your way to getting the most from your home theater.