LG SJ8500 Calibration Settings

These are the settings we used to do the calibration of the 55" LG SJ8500, and these should also be good for the 65" variant (65SJ8500). These work with everything except for gaming which requires some minor changes, which are listed below.

The first thing we did was to select the 'IFS Expert (Dark Room)' as it was the picture mode that gave us the closest result to our calibration goal. We set the 'Aspect Ratio Settings' to 'Original' since we did not want our input to be stretched in any way. If you have some older lower resolution content that does not completely fill the screen, you could change it to a mode that stretches the original content to match the screen. We also turned 'Off' the 'Energy Saving' mode, so that the TV would remain the same no matter how bright the room is. Finally, the 'Eye Comfort Mode' was left off, since we do not want the color temperature of the TV to change by itself depending on the content played.

For review purposes and for our completely dark room, we adjusted 'Backlight' to 33 to reach our desired luminance of 100 cd/m². You should adjust it to match your room environment. For a brighter room, this will need to be increased. Not that this does not affect the color accuracy, only the luminance of the display. We then increased the 'Contrast' to 95 since it helped the calibration. We left 'Brightness' to 50, its default value. Both the 'H Sharpness' and 'V Sharpness' were set to 0 since we did not want to add any oversharpness.

We left 'Color' to 50 and 'Tint' to 0, their default values.

In the 'Expert Controls' settings page, since we want to keep as true to the source our video content we turned off 'Dynamic contrast', 'Super Resolution', 'Edge Enhancer' and 'Color Filter'. We then set the 'Color Gamut' to 'Auto' since when set to 'Auto' The TV will change the 'Color Gamut' automatically to match the source. The gamma was changed to 2.2 since it is the gamma that we aimed for during calibration.

In the 'White Balance' settings, we selected the 'Warm2' from the 'Color Temperature' settings since it was the 'Color Temperature' the closest to our calibration goal. If you find the color temperature to warm (red or yellow), you can select a colder temperature.

From the 'Picture Options' menu, we turned off 'Noise Reduction' and 'MPEG Noise Reduction', but you can turn on these on if you are watching older low-resolution content, as it may help reduce visual noise and compression artifacts. We set the 'Black Level' to 'Low' to match our source 'Output Dynamic Range'. When set incorrectly, blacks will look much more grayish or may be crushed. We left 'Motion Eye Care' off since we did not want the TV to change the brightness of the TV automatically depending on the displayed scene. The 'Real Cinema' option was turned off for the review process, but it should be left turned on, since it is the option that will remove judder from 24p movies (you can read more on our 24p playback test here). For the 'LED Local Dimming' depending on the test we were running, we the different settings, from 'Off' to 'High' and we found that the local dimming feature is not really well implemented. We recommend turning it to 'High' first and then if you notice some changes in brightness while you are watching TV or a movie, you can set it to medium or low and off completely if it becomes too distracting. But in any case, you can try and test each setting and select the level of local dimming that you feel is the best for you.

The 'TruMotion setting is related to the motion interpolation and if you like the soap opera setting, you can set the setting to 'User' and adjust the slider to add the level of desired soap opera effect. You can read more about this feature here.

First thing to do is to turn on 'HDMI ULTRA HD Deep Color' for the HDMI port where you intend to connect your HDR UHD Blu-ray players (or video games console if you are using it as a Blu-ray player), as some players may not detect that the TV can support the full HDMI bandwidth necessary for HDR content.

When the TV detects HDR content, it will give you 5 'HDR Picture Mode' options. For movies, the 'Cinema' picture mode is the best option available since it will give you more control of the settings, similar to what you have access with 'IFS Expert (Dark Room)' with SDR content.

To get the best input lag possible when gaming whether you are in SDR or HDR, you need to set the 'Picture Mode' to 'Game'.

Once the 'Game' picture mode is selected, some options won't be available in the setting pages since the 'Game' picture mode disables most of the image processing to give better input lag. Under game mode, the color temperature setting is a slider giving you a different control from colder to warmer and a good starting point would be 'W35', but you can adjust the color temperature to your liking by adjusting the slider manually. The gamma selection is also a bit different, giving you the option from 'Low' to 'High2'. If you are playing a game in HDR though, the gamma option can't be changed. In both cases, adjust these to your preference. For the rest of the available settings, you can follow our general settings.

If you want to activate the Chroma subsampling (4:4:4) on the SJ8500, you need to set the 'Input Label' to 'PC' (from the input menu) for the HDMI port where your device is connected and be sure that the 'HDMI ULTRA HD Deep Color' is also turned on. You can read more on the subject here.