All your buddies are set to come over to watch the big game, and so you’ve already bought the snacks and beer, and busted out a few folding chairs to accommodate the crowd.

But don’t forget about the one thing your guests will be staring at for four hours straight: the big-screen television.

To ensure the action is smooth and the colors are just right, the following are a few simple tips and tricks to optimizing the picture (and sound) of your existing TV.

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a view of a computer: This Wednesday, May 30, 2007, file photo shows a cable box on top of a television in Philadelphia. Cable and satellite TV providers are ringing in 2018 with an unwelcomed gift: higher cable bills. Although annual rate hikes are inevitable, many consumers manage to lower their bills by pushing back and getting promotional rates.
© Matt Rourke, AP This Wednesday, May 30, 2007, file photo shows a cable box on top of a television in Philadelphia. Cable and satellite TV providers are ringing in 2018 with an unwelcomed gift: higher cable bills. Although annual rate hikes are inevitable, many consumers manage to lower their bills by pushing back and getting promotional rates.
While it might seem obvious, ensure your main TV source – like your cable or satellite box – is the best your provider has to offer (or rather, the best you can afford). If it’s a couple of years old, make sure it’s at least an HD receiver, but a 4K box is even better, providing you have a 4K TV, which delivers four times the resolution of an HDTV.

Even better, if you’re set up with an antenna for an OTA (“over-the-air”) signal, the game will likely look better than what your cable company can deliver – and it’s free, too.

NBC hasn’t confirmed it will be broadcasting Super Bowl LII in 4K Ultra HD. Still, a 4K TV can up-convert an HD signal to near 4K quality.

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Use a newer HDMI cable to handle your audio and video
If you’re streaming the game online, be sure to have a fast Internet connection for smooth and stutter-free picture and sound.

Tweak your levels
a group of people standing in front of a store: Brightness and saturation levels may be turned up too high with your TV’s default settings – as manufacturers like their televisions to ‘pop’ in store – but it might not look so good at home.
© Best Buy/handout Brightness and saturation levels may be turned up too high with your TV’s default settings – as manufacturers like their televisions to ‘pop’ in store – but it might not look so good at home.
Many TVs are programmed out of the box to be shown in a store, often with high brightness to capture a passerby’s attention, and this might not look so good in your home.

“Instead, you’ll get better picture fidelity at lower brightness levels, so details won’t be washed out,” says Paul Gagnon, executive director and analyst at IHS Markit, a global market research firm. “You notice a lot more detail with lower brightness, so drop it down to see what looks good to you.”

When setting up a new TV, you might be asked if it’s to be used in a store or a home, and it should optimize the picture accordingly.

Color and saturation levels might also be off on your new TV, adds David Davis, one of two brothers who owns Davis Audio & Video, a custom installer in Chicago. “Most people aren’t going to use test pattern discs to calibrate their TV, but because many new televisions are set to have super saturated colors and high brightness to capture people’s eyes in a store, play with the settings to make everything look more natural – like you’re really at the game.”

Try this before everyone comes over. And if it looks worse, revert it back to factory settings on the menu screen, he says.

While not every audio-video enthusiast will agree, a tip to vastly improving picture quality of your television is to turn up the contrast almost to full and reduce the brightness down to below half. This little-known trick makes blacks blacker, colors richer, and gets rid of the washed-out look some entry-level TVs have.

Motion matters
You might also need to tweak the motion settings of your television, whether you need to speed it up or slow it down. Say, what?

On speeding it up, fast-paced motion was harder to handle for some older LCD TVs – as a team’s running back might look blurry as he sprints down the field – and so television manufacturers started to double, triple or even quadruple the typical 60-frames-per-second picture. That’s why you see 60Hz (“Hertz”), 120Hz and 240Hz televisions advertised.

“Generally speaking, sports look best in higher refresh rates, so if your TV has the ability to upconvert to higher refresh rate, enable it,” suggests IHS Markit's Gagnon. “Depending on your TV, it may be called ‘frame rate,’ ‘motion rate,’ or ‘hertz,’ so take a look in the video settings.”

What’s more, some TVs let you enable a feature called “motion smoothing” or “motion interpolation,” so experiment with that, too. If it has a Sports mode, go for that.

But sometimes the faster the Hertz, the more motion sick some people feel. “If you’re not used to this, your guests may not like it if the refresh rate is too high, so you can turn that down,” said Davis of Davis Audio & Video.

Remember this: the thinner TVs are getting, the worse the audio tends to be.

After all, how good do you think sound will be coming out of a pancake-shaped speaker?

If you don’t have the budget, space or technical know-how to set up a surround sound system for your home theater – which usually consists of a multi-channel audio-video (AV) receiver and at least six speakers spread through the room (including a subwoofer for low-frequency bass) – at least consider one of the newer sound bars to add some boom to your room.

Sitting just below or above your television, sound bars house multiple speakers in a horizontal enclosure, and deliver multichannel sound from your sports, movies, TV shows, and video games.

Many sound bars include a wireless subwoofer to place somewhere else in the room, plus most sound bars let you stream music from your smartphone, tablet or computer, via Bluetooth connectivity.

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Follow Marc on Twitter: @marc_saltzman. E-mail him at www.marcsaltzman.com.