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Sony X850E Calibration Settings

Updated 
For additional settings information, please consult the Common Problems and How to Calibrate pages.

Here are the settings that used to calibrate the 65" Sony XBR65X850E TV. We expect these to be valid for the 75" version (XBR75X850E). The following settings are good for any content, from watching movies and TV shows to gaming. For Gaming, some little adjustments need to be done to have the best performance, and they are listed below.

General Settings

Sony X850E Calibration Settings 4

The first thing we did was to turn off the 'Light sensor' since we did not want the luminance of the TV to change depending on the ambient light.

Sony X850E Calibration Settings 1

For movies and TV content, we selected the 'Custom' 'Picture Mode', since it is the picture mode that brought us the closest to our calibration goal. Note that we always aim to display any content closest to what the creator intended and this means displaying the content without any added image processing.

Sony X850E Calibration Settings 6

In the 'Brightness' tab,  we set the 'Brightness' to 5 to get a luminosity level closest to our calibration target of 100 cd/m². The 'Brightness' should be adjusted to match your room lighting, and it won't affect the picture quality. We left the 'Contrast' to 90, the default value. The gamma was set to one to help us obtain our calibration goal. The 'Black level' was left to 50 and the 'Black adjust' and 'Adv. contrast enhancer' were left turned off, since we don't want to add any image processing.

Sony X850E Calibration Settings 7

In the 'Color' tab, we left at the default value of 50 for 'Color' and 0 for 'Hue'. We selected 'Expert 1' for the 'Color temperature' as this is the closest to the warm temperature of 6500K we are trying to achieve during calibration. If you find the color temperature to be too warm (reddish or yellowish) you can set it to a colder temperature. 'Live Color' was also left turned off, once again because we do not want to add extra image processing.

Sony X850E Calibration Settings 8

In the 'Clarity' tab, we left 'Sharpness' to 50 its default value since we did not want to introduce over sharpness. 'Reality Creation' was also left turned off. It could be turned on if you are watching some older content with a lower resolution like DVDs since it can help to improve the quality of the image. You can adjust with the 'Resolution' slider depending on how much effect you want to be added. The 'Mastered in 4K' option is a feature that will optimize the upscaling of 1080p Blu-rays movies that are listed as being 'Mastered in 4K'. It will not be possible to apply this setting if you are not watching a movie through other means than via a Blu-ray player, so in our case, we did not use this feature. 'Random noise reduction', 'Digital noise reduction' and 'Smooth gradation' were all left turned off, but those could be useful to ameliorate the quality of older and low-resolution content. 'Smooth gradation' is especially useful if you see a lot of color banding normally seen in 8-bit content since it will smooth the 8-bit gradation to make it look much better with less visual banding.

Sony X850E Calibration Settings 9

In the 'Motion' tab, 'Motionflow' and 'Cinemotion' were left turned off, but if you like the motion interpolation (or commonly named the soap opera effect), simply adjust the 'Motionflow' setting to 'Custom' and increase the 'Smoothness' slider. The 'Clearness' slider controls the image flicker control of the TV. To know more about this feature you can click here. If you are watching a movie via a 24p source and notice some judder, simply set 'Motionflow' to 'True Cinema' and 'CineMotion' to 'High' to have a judder-free experience. This doesn't add any soap opera effect.

HDR Settings

Sony X850E Calibration Settings 10

When HDR content is detected the TV will switch automatically to the good settings, but if you want to be sure you can verify that the 'Brightness' is set to maximum. In the 'Video options', also verify that 'HDR mode', 'HDMI video range' and 'Color space' are set to 'Auto' and it should change automatically to match the type of content you are watching, in this case, HDR content. For HDR movies, we recommend using the 'Cinema Pro' picture mode, since it is this mode that the TV delivers the best HDR movie experience.

SDR and HDR Gaming

Sony X850E Calibration Settings 2

For playing games via a video game console or PC (in SDR or HDR) simply choose the 'Game' 'Picture mode', and you can keep the general settings previously mentioned. Note that some options may not be available in game mode since most of the image processing is turned off while in game mode.

White Balance Settings

The following are the results of the white balance and colorspace calibration on our unit. They are provided for reference, and should not be copied as the calibration values vary per individual unit even for the same model and same size as the TV we reviewed due to manufacturing tolerances. If you want to try them you will need to enter all values shown, as all of them are active at the same time. If you end up with worse picture quality, simply reset them to the default values.

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