One of the features of Apple’s tvOS 14.5 is that it comes with a new display calibration tool. This is meant to help improve the colors of your display. Unfortunately, it seems that it might actually have the opposite effect, at least that’s according to Vincent Teoh who shared his findings on his HDTVTest YouTube channel.
For those who might not be familiar, a display might look fine out of the box, but sometimes it might not necessarily display the best color accuracy. This might be important if you’re editing photos or videos and you need to know that the color you’re seeing is accurate. This is why certain monitors that seemingly lack features are so expensive because they’ve been color calibrated for professionals.
That being said, it seems that the tvOS 14.5 calibration tool might need more work. This is because according to Teoh’s findings, the calibration process actually makes the picture worse. There was an instance where it even tried to calibrate a $42,000 Sony reference monitor which was already considered to be “perfect”.
Teoh ran the test on several other TVs and the results were less than favorable. For the most part, it actually made the picture worse, save for an LG OLED TV that did improve color accuracy, but was nowhere close to a properly conducted calibration using specialized tools. So if you’re in need for a color accurate display, the tvOS 14.5 feature might not be the best choice.