Seven upright bars fill the screen: grey, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, red and blue, with each channel either off or at 191 of 255. Every bar should be one flat colour with a clean edge, and each should look darker than the bar on its left.
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Seven colour bars at 75 percentSeven upright bars fill the screen: grey, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, red and blue, with each channel either off or at 191 of 255. Every bar should be one flat colour with a clean edge, and each should look darker than the bar on its left.
Eight colour bars at 100 percentWhite, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, red, blue and black, with every channel fully on or fully off. Broadcast engineers use full-strength bars to check peak colour and saturation. At home, look for a bar that glows past its edge or tints its neighbour.
Bars with a blue-check stripUnder the seven bars runs a short strip: blue, black, magenta, black, cyan, black, grey. Seen in blue light alone, each strip block carries exactly as much blue as the bar above it, so bar and strip should merge into four plain blue columns.
Show all 30 patterns and checks (27 more)
Patterns the page draws, continued
Blue-only preview of the barsThe page can show its own blue channel alone, as a picture of what a correct screen looks like in blue light. It cannot test your TV this way. For that, the TV must filter out red and green itself, or you must look through a blue filter.
Grey staircase, black to white in 11 stepsEleven flat greys from level 0 to level 255, each a tenth of the signal brighter than the last. Count them. Steps that merge at the dark end point to Brightness set too low, and at the bright end to Contrast set too high. None should carry a tint.
Grey ramp, all 256 levelsA smooth sweep from black to white across the screen. On a Full HD set each of the 256 levels is a stripe 7.5 pixels wide, too narrow to see singly. Broad visible bands mean levels are being rounded together somewhere, the fault known as colour banding.
Near-black steps, levels 2 to 20Ten small patches on a pure black screen, from level 2 to level 20 of 255, which is 0.8 to 7.8 percent of the signal. They set Brightness. Dim the room first, because reflections on the glass hide these patches long before the TV does.
Near-white steps, levels 235 to 253Ten patches on a pure white screen, from level 235 to level 253 of 255. They set Contrast. If the brightest few cannot be told from the white around them, the TV is clipping its highlights, and the detail in clouds, snow and white shirts goes with them.
Checkerboard, 4 by 4 black and whiteSixteen rectangles, half white and half black: a checkerboard of the kind engineers use to measure contrast with both extremes on screen at once. By eye, judge the black blocks. If they look grey here yet black on an all-black screen, light from the bright areas is leaking in.
Sharpness lines on mid greyBlack and white lines one, two and four pixels wide on a grey field. A TV's Sharpness control is edge enhancement: it draws a bright and a dark fringe beside every edge. Turn it down until the pale halo beside each black line disappears, then stop.
Overscan frame with 3.5 and 5 percent markersA one-pixel white line round the edge of the picture, with inner frames 3.5 and 5 percent in. One broadcaster's guidelines keep 3.5 percent clear for action, and 5 percent at top and bottom for titles. A missing outer line on any side means the TV is enlarging and cropping.
Colour-edge check, red on blueOne-pixel red and blue lines, with small red text on a blue ground. Video compression usually stores colour at half the resolution of brightness, which blurs these lines into purple. If they blur over a cable too, look in the source's display settings for a full RGB or 4:4:4 output.
The seven bars, left to right 7
Bar 1, greyAll three channels at 191, hex #BFBFBF, the brightest bar at 75 percent of the signal. It should be a neutral grey. A pink, green or blue cast here comes from the colour temperature or white balance setting, and it will tint every other bar the same way.
Bar 2, yellowRed and green on, blue off: #BFBF00, signal brightness 69.5 percent. With Colour turned to zero it should become the grey #B1B1B1, a shade darker than bar 1. In blue light alone it goes fully black, because it holds no blue at all.
Bar 3, cyanGreen and blue on, red off: #00BFBF, 59.0 percent. It is the grey bar with the red taken out, so it is the one to compare if you suspect the red channel. With red missing altogether, bar 1 turns exactly this colour. In blue light alone: lit.
Bar 4, greenGreen alone: #00BF00, 53.6 percent. Green carries 71.5 percent of the brightness in a video signal, which is why the four bars that contain it sit on the left and the three without it on the right. In blue light alone: black.
Bar 5, magentaRed and blue on, green off: #BF00BF, 21.3 percent. The fall from bar 4 to this one is the biggest step in the staircase, 32.2 points, because this is where green switches off. In blue light alone: lit. With Colour at zero it becomes the grey #363636.
Bar 6, redRed alone: #BF0000, 15.9 percent. With Colour turned to zero it should become the dark grey #292929, darker than bar 5 and lighter than bar 7. Its edges against bars 5 and 7 should be as crisp as the edge between bars 1 and 2. In blue light alone: black.
Bar 7, blueBlue alone: #0000BF, only 5.4 percent of the signal's brightness, so it is the darkest bar by far. With Brightness set too low it sinks toward black. In blue light alone it is lit, and it should match bar 1 exactly.
Setting up the TV, in order 7
Get the pattern onto the TV firstOpen this page in the TV's browser, or connect a laptop by cable and go full screen. No browser? Save the pattern as a PNG at the TV's pixel size and, if its photo viewer opens PNG files, show it from a USB stick. Wireless mirroring compresses the picture.
Choose the picture mode before anything elsePick the picture mode you actually watch in, then adjust that one. Changing mode afterwards swaps in a different set of values. While you work, switch off any eco or light sensor and any dynamic contrast setting, because both keep changing the picture under you.
Brightness is the black level controlShow the near-black steps in a dim room. Lower Brightness until the darkest patches vanish, then raise it until the lowest one you can find just separates from the black around it. If the background itself turns grey, you have gone too far, so come back down.
Contrast sets where white clipsShow the near-white steps and raise Contrast until the brightest patches start to merge with the white background, then come back until they separate again. Look at the near-black steps once more afterwards, because the two controls can pull on each other.
Colour and Tint, in blue light onlyShow the bars with the blue-check strip and view them in blue light alone. Adjust Colour, then Tint, until every bar matches the strip block under it and four plain blue columns remain. With no way to see blue alone, leave both controls at their defaults.
Picture size: show every pixelA flat panel fed a digital signal has no need to crop the edge, yet many sets still ship with overscan on, and the enlarged picture is softer. Look in the picture size or aspect menu for the setting that shows the signal pixel for pixel. Makers name it differently.
Signal range: make both ends agreeVideo puts black at level 16 and white at 235, while computers use 0 and 255. If the source and the TV disagree, either the near-black steps below 16 stay hidden whatever Brightness does, or black turns grey. Find the range setting on both and match them.
What a wrong picture means 4
The grey bar looks cyan: no redWith the red channel missing, the seven bars read cyan, green, cyan, green, blue, black, blue. Check the TV's own menu next. It is drawn inside the set, so if its colours are right the panel is fine and the fault lies in the cable, the input or the source.
The grey bar looks magenta: no greenWith the green channel missing, the seven bars read magenta, red, blue, black, magenta, red, blue. Reseat both ends of the cable, then try another input and another source, changing one thing at a time, until the grey bar comes back.
The grey bar looks yellow: no blueWith the blue channel missing, the seven bars read yellow, yellow, green, green, red, red, black. A picture mode that warms the image for evening use can look similar but milder: the blue bar dims without going black. Switch such modes off before you judge.
All seven bars are greyThe brightness staircase is arriving and the colour is not. Look first for Colour turned to zero or a black and white picture mode. The seven greys should still step down from left to right, at about 75, 70, 59, 54, 21, 16 and 5 percent.
How this list was compiled: Written for this page. Every hex value, level, percentage and pixel count was computed: 75 percent of 255 is 191; signal brightness is Rec. 709 luma (0.2126 R + 0.7152 G + 0.0722 B on the encoded values, full white as 100) from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._709, which also gives video black as 16 and white as 235; the look of the bars with one channel missing is that channel set to zero. The order of the seven bars, the 75 percent level, the descending staircase, the strip under the bars that merges with them in blue light, and the three near-black bars used to set black level are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPTE_color_bars and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_line-up_generation_equipment. Full-strength bars with a black eighth bar, used to check peak colour and saturation, are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBU_colour_bars. Overscan on fixed-pixel screens and the safe margins (for a 16:9 picture the BBC table there gives action safe as 3.5 percent each way, and title safe as 5 percent top and bottom and 10 percent at the sides) are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan. Sharpness as edge enhancement is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_enhancement, colour banding from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_banding, the checkerboard contrast method from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_ratio, colour stored at reduced resolution from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling, and compressed wireless mirroring from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracast. That test cards were originally physical cards a television camera was pointed at, and that electronically generated test patterns came in during the late 1960s, are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_card. All checked 2026-09-19. The patterns are this site's own drawings in the style of broadcast bars. A web page cannot send the below-black level of the broadcast pattern, so this one starts at level 2, and none of it is a calibrated reference. Licence: own work
How it works
This TV color test screen fills a television with seven colour bars, then eleven more test patterns: near-black and near-white steps, a grey ramp, a checkerboard, sharpness lines and an overscan frame. Each has a note on the correct picture.
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What the seven bars should look like
The bars run grey, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, red, blue, drawn in the style of the SMPTE colour bars, every channel either off or at 75 percent. Turn the TV's Colour control to zero and they should become seven greys, each darker than the last. A grey bar that looks cyan, magenta or yellow means a whole colour channel is missing.
Black first, then white, then colour
Show the near-black steps in a dim room and set Brightness so the lowest patch just separates from black. Set Contrast with the near-white steps likewise. Colour and Tint need blue light alone, through a blue filter or a TV's blue-only mode.
No browser on the TV? Save color test images as PNG, 1920 by 1080 or 3840 by 2160, and show them from USB.
Show the overscan frame first. A missing white edge line means the TV is cropping and rescaling.
Turn off eco sensors and dynamic contrast first: both keep changing the picture.
Questions and answers
What does a color test TV screen show?
Settings and faults you can see by eye: blacks crushed or whites clipped, a missing colour channel, a cropped edge, over-sharpening and banding.
Is this color test pattern the same as a broadcast color test card?
No. A test card began as a physical card that a studio camera was pointed at. Broadcast bars are exact signals read on instruments. Ours are drawings in the same style, not a calibrated reference: good for settings by eye, no substitute for a meter.
Why can't I see the darkest patches on the TV test screen?
Suspect a range mismatch between the source and the TV, once a dim room has ruled out glare. Video puts black at 16 and white at 235; computers use 0 and 255. Find the range setting on both and make them match.
Will casting the test pattern to my TV work?
It will show the patterns, but wireless mirroring sends compressed video, which softens colour edges. You test the link as much as the TV. The TV's own browser, a laptop on a cable, or a saved PNG on a USB stick is cleaner.