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Kevin Cochran

It might seem like you're getting the same result in the example you cite, but an LCD TV's backlight has little to do with setting brightness and contrast. There's really only one way to set the contrast and brightness correctly. Start with the backlight at a moderate level, then set the brightness followed by the contrast. These controls are often interactive, so go back and forth between the corresponding patterns and tweak the controls until they are both set correctly.

Then, you can adjust the backlight to suit your taste and the ambient light in the room. Turn it down in a dark room to get better blacks, and turn it up when the lights are on. The backlight controls the overall light output of the TV, moving the absolute white and black levels up and down together, so the brightness and contrast controls will be correct at different backlight settings.

Looking at the cadence tests using the deinterlacing of the TV versus the AVR tells you which one does a better job. Set the player to output 1080i and enable the AVR's deinterlacing, then play the cadence tests (especially 2:2 and 2:3 PF-T) to see how well the AVR performs this function, then disable the AVR's deinterlacing and play the tests to see how well the TV does it. Whichever way looks best is the way you should watch 1080i broadcast content. You can also compare how well the player deinterlaces by setting it to output 1080p.

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