i hope you bought a bravia. *cough* nice sets. if it's for the lounge, it's got to be 40" for the 1080p. mine, which i bought at xmas for the bedroom, is a 32" because 40" would be too large for there, and so it only goes 720p / 1080i. very smart set, full control over the thing with all these cleverly considered options which let you have independant settings on each input device. nice...

Oh, I did. Bravia X-Series, 1080p, 40". Looks stunning and later on today I'll be running the setup DVD to get all the colour levels right.

It's not for the lounge, straight into the games/cinema room!

congrats. you just bought the best TV on the market. the one i want in my lounge. anyway, it's worth taking the time to calibrate the picture, you'll find guidance on this online, as well as some DVD-based solutions for more advanced forms of calibration. oh, and a tip : when you first put the set on, it's picture can look soft... you'll see mentions online that LCDs take time to warm-up into prime condition, something like 100 hours viewing. well, i found that a good workout (a decent DVD on 1080p) will exercise the crystals into action and the softness will go very quickly. there tends to be one setting (or slight variations around it) that work well on each LCD TV - take off the things like edge enhancement and go for mid-range on the color and brightness, but have high contrast. at first, these LCD sets looks unsympathetic to bad-encoding, so normal freeview will always be a little crap - a decent player and DVD will show you what it can actually do. enjoy.

Well I used my old DVD Essentials to get some of it done, but I need a new LCD based one. There was one I heard mention was good but I just can't remember which.

Yeah, set the colour to natural, all sharpness and noise reduction off, and colour and contrast have come down a notch for now.

Ah, I didn't realise about the workout. Well the PS3 and XBox are on tonight as I'm having a non cinema evening.

There's no freeview going on this set! Thanks for the pointers logboy - do you have some tips for the callibration DVD?

i've not used a calibration DVD on my set. i bought one, well, my brother did, and it's no good unless you have a blur-ray or HD player - you want the blu-ray variant of it 'dve : digital video essentials' because the blu-ray side does 720 and 1080, the DVD side of the disc doesn't concerne itself with upscaling, and so only does 480.

the best things is to keep the backlight low, the contrast high, the color and brightness middling, turn all advance settings off, and make the sharpness in the middle (mines at 15) and you should find that fits the general advice shown online.

Thanks logboy, that's the one I've heard about before. I'll go order a copy today.

Those settings are pretty much what I've done already. I've kept some of the auto settings on though, such as the blackness and contrast. I might try them off too then. Sharpness is off altogether.