Improve your TV's picture by changing these settings

It’s important to know how to personalise your TV picture to what suits you and your home. These simple tips will help you get started.

Find the right menu

No two TV brands work exactly the same way, so we can’t tell you precisely which buttons to press. However, the general approach is similar between brands.

As a starting point, on your remote control, you will have a “Menu” or “Settings” button with a submenu called something like “Picture”. Most, if not all, of the following settings can be found in there.

Set the picture mode

Modes are preset configurations that change how the TV runs to best suit a particular kind of video.

Movie or cinema mode produces an artistic, accurate picture. It’s closest to what directors intend you to see. If your TV has a filmmaker mode, we’d recommend using that – it’s the best preset we’ve come across to date. However, movie modes look worse in bright light, so consider closing the curtains.

Dynamic, vivid and sport modes tend to crank everything to the max, including brightness and saturation. They turn the big game or the 6 o’clock news into a spectacle, but also make your footage look fake. We don’t recommend them.

Normal mode falls somewhere in between movie and dynamic modes. It’s the mode we’d use to watch sport or other live entertainment video. It’s also a decent option for those who can’t be bothered switching modes, although we think a movie setting is a better default for most people.

The picture mode is the most powerful setting on a TV and will make a real difference to your experience. You could safely stop reading now, but to get the perfect TV picture, it’s worth making a few tweaks to the presets.

Turn off motion smoothing

This feature, also called video interpolation, splices extra frames into what you’re watching to reduce motion blur. It essentially increases the frame rate of your video, which is good for sports and fine for reality TV, but often makes films and dramatic TV look wrong. Films are shot at a much lower frame rate, which subconsciously adds to the artistic feel. Motion smoothing takes that away – sometimes called the “soap opera effect”.

You can turn motion smoothing onto a low setting under the advanced picture settings. If you’re a film or prestige drama buff, turn it off completely.

Be aware that each TV brand has a different name for motion smoothing:

• LG – TruMotion
• Panasonic – IFC (for intelligent frame creation)
• Samsung – auto motion plus
• Sony – Motionflow
• Hisense and TCL – motion enhancement or motion clarity.

Tweak the brightness and contrast

TVs are usually tuned very bright in stores to compete with other displays and harsh shop-floor lights. At home, a screen that is too bright will look washed out.

Black level, which controls how dark the blacks can get, goes by the unhelpful moniker of brightness on most TVs. You should turn it down as far as you can while not losing detail in dark areas of the screen. Usually that’s around 50% brightness, but it depends on the level of natural light in your room.

White level is also called contrast and affects the intensity of whites. You should turn this up as high as you can without washing out the detail in very light regions, such as light greys. Usually, you can get close to 100%.

Non-OLED TVs have a separate backlight setting, which mostly affects the brightness of light colours. We recommend leaving the backlight on low so you don’t blind yourself during well-lit scenes, but if your room is especially bright, a medium setting will work better.

Sharpness controls the contrast around objects. It’s an easy way to make different elements of a video stand out. However, with today’s HD screens, it only really causes unwanted side effects. We recommend turning sharpness right down and possibly even to zero, unless that makes your picture look fuzzy.

Adjust the colours

There are typically three colour settings to tweak: temperature, saturation and hue.

Temperature is called tone or white balance on some TVs. If whites appear to have a blue tinge, choose a “warm” temperature setting. If they have a red tinge, choose “cool”. Otherwise, leave as is.

Saturation controls how vivid the colours are. If they look unnaturally vibrant, turn it down a bit. If your picture looks almost greyscale, saturation has somehow ended up too low. Your TV might refer to saturation as simply colour.

Hue should be left near the centre, and the default setting is probably okay. You only need to tinker with hue if colours are plain wrong (like a red banana, for instance).

Use game mode (if you’re so inclined)

Gamers routing a console through their TV can enjoy much lower input lag when this mode is turned on – enough to make a real difference in twitch-based genres like shooters and platformers. Because it turns off some processing features, game mode can slightly damage image quality, so it’s worth exiting game mode again once your session is over. Game mode can either be found as a picture mode (see above) or as a separate toggle in the top-level menu.

Other features to give a side eye

In the arms race that is the TV market, manufacturers are always pushing innovative new features as selling points. Here are some settings that have benefits, but also side effects that reduce image quality. We’d turn them down or switch them off, but feel free to try them and judge for yourself.

• LG – dynamic contrast, noise reduction, colour adjustment, super resolution, motion eye care
• Panasonic – colour remaster, dynamic range remaster
• Samsung – local dimming, brightness optimisation, white balance, shadow detail
• Sony – dynamic contrast, adaptive backlight, live colour, advanced contrast enhancer, smooth gradation.