Your television left the factory configured to win an argument in a shop. Bright room, forty other screens on the same wall, three seconds of somebody’s attention. Every setting that ships switched on exists to survive that fight, and almost every one of them is wrong in a living room at nine at night.
Twenty minutes. No new hardware. Here is the order I do them in.
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Change the picture mode first.
Whatever it arrived in — Vivid, Dynamic, Standard — leave. Choose Movie, Cinema, or Filmmaker Mode. This single change does most of the work in this article, because those modes exist to match the standard the content was actually made to, and they switch several of the offenders below off on your behalf. It will look dull for about two days. Your eyes are adjusting, not disagreeing.
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Turn off motion smoothing.
Every manufacturer gives it a different name and none of them call it motion smoothing. Look for anything with Motion, Clear, Smooth or Flow in the name and set it off. This is the setting that makes films look like they were shot on a camcorder in a car park. If you genuinely like it for live sport, the setting is usually stored per picture mode, so put it in the sports mode and nowhere else.
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Turn off the enhancers.
Noise reduction, dynamic contrast, edge enhancement, and anything with Intelligent or Dynamic in front of it. They were designed for the noisy broadcast signals of twenty years ago and they now spend their evenings smearing detail off a perfectly good stream. Sharpness goes to zero, or to the middle of the scale if the middle is the neutral point on your set. Real sharpness is resolution. What that control adds is a white halo around every edge.
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Set colour temperature to Warm.
It will look yellow. It will look wrong. It is correct, and it is close to what the people who graded the film were looking at while they graded it. Give it three days before you judge, then go back to the cool setting for a moment and see what you make of it.
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Switch on full bandwidth for the HDMI port you actually use.
This is the one that quietly costs people the picture they paid for. Buried in the settings, each HDMI input has an option — Enhanced, UHD Colour, Input Signal Plus, the name varies — and on most sets it is off by default. Without it that port cannot carry 4K at full colour or at higher frame rates, and your console or streaming box has been falling back for a year without mentioning it. Turn it on for the port with the good source in it rather than all of them, because on older sets it can upset less capable devices.
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Send the shop’s other souvenirs home.
The light sensor that dims the picture whenever somebody turns a lamp on, the energy-saving mode that dims it permanently, and the store demonstration mode if it survived delivery. Dim is a decision you get to make.
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Turn off viewing data collection.
Under a friendly name, usually something about improving your recommendations, most smart televisions ship with automatic content recognition switched on: sampling what is on the screen and reporting it. It is not a picture setting and it is not why you bought a television. Off.
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Sort the sound out, if you own anything better than the panel.
With a soundbar or receiver connected, set the television’s own speakers off, use the HDMI port marked ARC or eARC, and set the digital audio output to pass the signal through rather than convert it. And if you are on the built-in speakers, find the dialogue or clear voice mode and stop spending the whole evening on the volume button.
One rule for how to judge any of it
Do all of this in the room’s normal evening lighting, with something you know well playing. Not a demonstration reel, not the brightest thing you own. A film you have seen forty times will tell you the truth faster than any test pattern, because you already know what the faces are supposed to look like.
There is a point where settings stop helping: a panel that cannot get bright enough for high dynamic range to mean anything, or an older set with no port that will carry a modern source properly. If you have worked through the eight above and the picture is still the complaint, that is the hardware telling you something. TCL’s current range is where I would start pricing, because the panel and port specifications are published plainly instead of hidden behind adjectives. See TCL’s current television range
Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy through them, HowTo: Tech Edition earns a commission at no extra cost to you. Do the eight settings first. They are free, and most people never need the rest of this paragraph.
Tested on the family television, which spent two years in Vivid mode with motion smoothing on while I was told the picture looked fine, and on my grandmother’s set, where step seven took the longest to find and was the one she cared about most.