Getting the perfect viewing experience form your television is a tricky thing. You will need to achieve just the right levels of settings like contrast, color temperature, sharpness and motion smoothing. To help you make that happen, here is a simple guide to help you understand the most important settings for you to know and adjust.

The first thing is to make sure your television is the right distance from where you will be when you are looking at it. The ideal distance is about twice as far as the television's diagonal length. Next, set the lighting conditions to those you mostly use while watching television (sunlight, your house lighting etc.). Once you have sorted that and you are sitting in the right spot, it's time to get dive in.

For almost all televisions all the things you will need to change can be found under the "Picture settings". A lot of modern televisions have pre-set picture modes like "Vivid" or "Cinema" which might make the picture look too reddish or dark for some people. These presets might look fine to you and you might be used to them by now, but they normally don't show a truly accurate image. In any case you can always change these by a bit for your personal taste and restore the default setting if you change your mind.

The "Contrast" and "Brightness" settings controls how bright and dark the image will be, depending on the televisions light output. Adjust both of these until you get your pictures brightness and darkness as close as possible to those of the cliff in the upper right corner. If adjusted in the right way you will be able to clearly see the details of black objects and easy distinguish between white objects, and a bright background.

The "Color" setting determines the color saturation of your television. Too high and it might look like a cartoon, too low and you will not be able to see all the colors of a flower field. Change this setting until you reach a color saturation like the one in the picture of the middle house. For best results, do so while watching a scene for a show or a movie with as many colors as you can find.

"Sharpness" controls how much your television preforms "edge enhancements" by adding a faint outline to objects. While it might make the image appear sharper it really conceals a lot of the fine details so you want to keep this setting relatively low.

For the "Color Mode" feature the recommended settings are either "normal" or "Rec709". Do not use "Expanded", "Enhanced" or anything like that, it might sound good, but your image will be worse.

Lastly, the "color temperature" feature can make the images on your television "warmer", which means more red colors, or "colder" which makes everything a bit more bluish. Generally, the Warmer colors are more accurate. Just don't set it too high or everyone on the television will look like they just got sunburned. The ideal balance is shown in the biggest part of the picture where you can tell each color apart.

Now that you've calibrated your TV to your complete satisfaction, and perhaps even explored other settings, it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy your viewing experience. Remember, you can adjust any setting as many times as you want and restore it to the default if you don't like it, so don't be afraid to experiment!