There are 4K TVs, OLED TVs and a whole bunch of new full HD TVs in the market. This is the future of home entertainment and it’s the right time to buy one. Other reasons to buy a TV now is the bevy of 4K TVs available at extremely affordable prices and easily available 4K and full HD content. If you have recently purchased a TV and are running it on its default picture settings, you may have landed at the right place. Watching a TV with the wrong settings enabled, is just not OK! You may want to consider changing settings and by doing so, you might be in for a surprise.
If you use the remote and navigate to the Settings tab on your TV, you’ll notice the settings are categorized into sections. Some have some catchy names like “Ultra Black”, “Game Mode”, etc. Most of these settings are marketing gimmicks. In fact, some of these settings degrade the picture quality by reducing details from it, increasing colour and giving you a gaudy picture.
If you want to make the picture look perfect, you will need to make a few adjustments to the picture settings. You don’t even have to spend a lot of time doing it. These are some of our recommended, quick fixes.
Avoid Dynamic, Movie and Sports mode
If you have ever walked inside TV stores or showrooms, you’ll find some TVs look bright and colourful. These TVs are setup with default picture settings out-of-the-box, designed to look more colourful and impressive than the next TV, under the store’s lighting. However, most of the settings are not ideal for your home. With default settings turned on, you’ll notice that the picture looks too bright and gaudy.
Generally, there are four picture modes commonly found on most TVs - Dynamic, Movie and Sports. They differ from brand to brand, and model to model. When you enable one of these modes, you'll notice that the brightness and colour settings are set to default values.
You need to use the Standard or Custom mode to get the best picture. These modes usually let you disable unnecessary picture settings, and do a lot more.
Set Local Dimming to Low
This feature is commonly found on Samsung and LG TVs. Sony calls it X-tended Dynamic Range PRO, other brands call it something else. In simple words, this feature balances the backlight on the TV, making dark shades in a scene look darker and deeper. When enabled, it dims the backlights behind every dark scenes.
By default, local dimming is set to High that makes the lighter shades look way too bright. This can strain your eyes and make the picture look odd at times. Consider setting it to low and see if you like the picture quality with it turned off. It’s likely to look more natural.
Turn off noise reduction
Once again, this feature is known differently on different brands and models. It’s called Digital Clean View in Samsung TVs and it’s meant to reduce noise and distortion in picture quality. It is ideal to leave it turned on when you are watching low resolution content, especially on standard definition cable TV. If you are using high-quality HD, 4K content, it is a good idea to disable it.
Disable Edge Enhancement
All TVs have a sharpness control. Some manufacturers add an edge enhancement feature in addition to the sharpness control, to try and enhance the edges in the picture. This is done by adding a thin line to patterns and outlines in the picture. This make edges look overly sharp and are visible if you pay close attention. That sounds good, but the halo effect often does more harm than good. It should be disabled in most cases.
Decide on Live Colour modes
HDR is one of the newest features in TVs. It helps enhance the picture quality by making changes to the brightness, colours and contrast levels. In most TVs, you’ll also notice a separate “Live colour mode” under the advanced picture settings. HDR mode and any related features are best used when you’re playing HDR content, not everyday movies and videos.
Turn off Auto Motion Plus
Auto Motion Plus is a term found on Samsung TVs. Although, its name differs from brand to brand - Sony calls it as "Motionflow", whereas LG calls it "TruMotion". These features help smooth out any blur between two frames. It is intended to make corrections in frames where there is fast moving action. While it sounds like a good idea, it ends up making videos look faster than they really are and artificial.
Turn off this feature, or reduce its intensity to low, so you see content the way it was recorded, with the more natural, lower frame rates.
These are some of the picture settings that you should make to make the most of your recent TV purchase. Most of these settings will help optimize picture quality, but you can go a step further and make finer tweaks to make your TV show natural looking pictures. Read this feature to know how.
