One of the innovations that were presented with the new Apple TV 4K, is the possibility of calibrating the image of your Smart TV with the help of an iPhone, an extremely simple process that will allow you to enjoy a much more realistic image with tones that will be closer to the intentions of the director of the film you are watching. Do you want to know how this new option is configured? Well keep reading.
What do you need
In order to adjust the color of the image on your screen, you will need some minimum requirements to complete the process, since not all Apple TVs will offer the option and not all iPhones will allow the calibration to be completed. The necessary tools are:
- An Apple TV with operating system TvOS 14.5 or higher
- An iPhone with Face ID and with iOS 14.5 or higher
All those iPhones that do not have the FaceID facial recognition system will not be able to complete this color configuration at any time, so in addition to the version of the operating system you must control that detail.
Concepts to keep in mind
Not by performing this image calibration you will enjoy its advantages in all situations. That is to say, the calibration is applied in the picture settings of Apple TV, and it has nothing to do with the image adjustments applied on the television. This means that if you open the Netflix application installed on your Smart TV you will not enjoy the calibrated color, since for this you would have to open the Netflix application installed on the Apple TV.
Basically you will have to use your Apple TV as a control center (if you don't already do it), and run from there all the applications and multimedia services in which you are interested in enjoying the color calibration of the image. If, on the other hand, you are going to play with your PS5 or your Xbox Series X, since it is a completely different HDMI source, it will not benefit from the applied settings that, we repeat, are applied only to the image offered by Apple TV.
In the same way, the image adjustments applied in the configuration of your television will affect the calibration process of Apple TV, so in these cases we recommend that you deactivate technologies such as image smoothing, dynamic contrast and other functions that do not work anymore. to modify the original image that your Smart TV receives. In this case, we would give absolute priority to the image offered by Apple TV.
It is important that you bear in mind that a correct calibration does not imply that you have to like the result, especially if until now you have enjoyed very saturated colors and little contrast.
How do you calibrate the image on Apple TV?
Thanks to new feature introduced in tvOS 14.5, calibrating the color of the Apple TV is extremely simple. Until now, to have an image with colors that respect the tones of the real world, we needed a colorimeter that is responsible for measuring the intensities of different colors displayed on the screen.
This device, in addition to being expensive and very technical, is not easy to use on a device like Apple TV, so Apple wanted to make the whole process easy and simple so that any user can get the best possible color in just a few minutes.
The idea to achieve this is to use the iPhone as a colorimeter, taking advantage of the front camera and the depth and infrared sensor of Face ID. Thanks to these elements, the iPhone is capable of analyzing the color values displayed on the screen, analyzing the results, and sending the exact color profile that Apple TV should display on your television.
The steps to start the calibration process are extremely simple:
- Access the panel adjustments from your Apple TV
- Enter the Video and Audio section
- Scroll down to the bottom of the menu and select “Color balance” within the Calibration section.
- Now it is the turn to look at the screen of your iPhone, since a notification on your screen will be warning you that you can start a calibration process. Click on Continue.
- At this point the Apple TV and the iPhone will communicate and you will be asked to place the phone in front of your TV screen keeping a distance of about 2,5 centimeters.
- You must bring the front face of the phone closer, so that the front camera looks directly at the image displayed on the screen of your Smart TV.
- The image will change to show different colors and tones until the process is finished. It will be the moment in which you will receive the notice that the calibration has finished.
Has it been calibrated correctly?
Once the process has finished, a split screen image will show you the original calibration you had up to now and the corrected calibration with the values taken by the iPhone. It will be there when you have to decide if the new configuration convinces you or not. Let's remember the points to take into account that we have mentioned before, especially those related to the image settings of your TV. Bad settings could make color calibration difficult, so the results may not convince you no matter how many calibrations you do.