You know who you are. You bought some high end TV and then paid some super-nerd to come around to your house and ensure that your new TV is perfectly calibrated color-wise.
I’m not one of you, but I need you now. You’re my only hope.
This may seem like a stupid question, but, when I’m asked by FH2 (or any game, really) to adjust a slider so that, for example, the box on the left with the number “1” in it is “barely visible,” what’s meant by “barely visible”?
“Barely visible” is a pretty subjective term. Does that mean I can still see the “1” but it’s just really dark? Or does it mean that I need to move the slider to the left until I’m one-click away from the “1” disappearing?
I’m not the nerd you are looking for, but since you can adjust this in game, I would recommend trying it at different settings and then try playing thru both day and night cycle and see what pleases your eyes the best. Like you, I used to wonder about these sliders and then just experimented until I liked it for the game I was playing.
Also, something else that matters to me at least, is to be consistent with the lighting that is on in the room you are playing the game. For example, I tend to play in a room that is almost dark and any light that is on will be behind me. For me, this makes a big difference for my eyes and the clarity of the game.
If you have an Xbox One, it has a built in calibration which is kinda handy. Other than that yeah it’s all personal preference. I usually set it so that if I go one bit more I can’t see it. I don’t know why they use a set up where 1 is the barely visible item. I liked the original Forza Horizon setting by which it had 3 boxes it said you shouldn’t see the first box, the second box should be barely visible and then the third is clearly visible. Made more sense to me.
Definitely use the XBox One’s video calibration program. It’ll walk you through adjustments to your TV’s video settings and help you set it at optimum levels for the XBox One.
Beyond that, adjusting in-game brightness is a personal preference thing and will vary according to how much ambient light is in your gaming area. It’ll be different from daytime to night.
Set it where you feel comfortable and see if it looks good, if so you’re fine. And you can always adjust the settings later.
Built-in calibration (console) or in-game calibration brings you nothing if your TV/monitor is set up incorrectly. Pretty much 99% of all TV’s come out of the box configured incorrectly by at least 5% and some up to 25% on some color-spectrum and thus you end up changing the “calibration” for each and every game differently.
If you’re serious about picture-quality, first thing to look for is an official (and somewhat expensive) ISF-calibration with different presets for movies, for gaming and for sports. After that, you never touch these presets ever again and only configure each device connected (like your DVR, console, mediacenter, BD-player, whatever).
The XBox video calibration program from the settings menu walks you through Calibrating your television’s settings. You do nothing to the console, it calibrates your physical television. It’s amazing what you can learn when you read.
I have owned many a high-end TV. I know what I’m talking about.
Please elaborate, your Xbox calibrates your televion how?
It doesn’t go into the servicemenu of your TV, it can’t measure the display-output vs. ambient light, it won’t adjust color temperature, it will not turn off enhancers that are present in your current TV-preset.
Anything that is done by using a software-enabled calibration (a console, a so-called calibration DVD and whatnot) is void as long as you haven’t got hardware to actually measure the display-output vs. reference-levels.
The whole idea to take away humen perception of a calibration is to make sure that #FFFFFF on your TV is actually #FFFFFF as measured by the connected calibration-hardware. No human can distinguish #FFFFFF from #FFFFFE especially with any kind of ambient light present. Even IF you were to distinguish these 2 values, then you need to take into account brightness, contrast, saturation and other parameters found deep within your TV servicemenu.
Looking forward hearing/reading how you calibrate anything at all without measuring the output.