How to adjust your TV settings for the best picture quality

chances are your TV could look a lot better if you like most folks bought a new TV got everything hooked up to it turned it on and just started watching then I'm afraid you skipped a highly beneficial step the good news is it's never too late to adjust your tv's picture settings to get a much better experience hey everyone I'm Caleb Denison for Digital Trends and before we launch into how to tweak your TV I want to say that I disagree with the idea that there is only one right way to set up your TV's picture settings I think the most important thing is to achieve a picture that works best for you all that matters is that you love the way your TV's picture looks I do think though that we can probably break TV watchers up into three main camps there's the average TV watcher for whom just a couple of key adjustments will do then there's the techie tweakers who like to dig in a little bit more and wring the most they can out of every pixel and then there are the purists among us who want accuracy above all else so no matter where you fall on the spectrum I think I have you covered let's start with the basics first select an input to adjust HDMI one two or any input that you have a blu-ray player cable box or streaming box connected to now start playing a disc or select an HD channel or streaming show to watch as you make adjustments and here's the important thing whatever you choose to watch make sure it is an SDR not HDR so use a regular blu-ray movie stream a non HDR YouTube or Netflix video or pick an HD channel from your cable or satellite providers this is not for testing by the way this is just to make sure we're an SDR mode and it gives us something to see in the background so the key is to get familiar with your TV's menu system and if you want some visual help just check out one of my unboxing and basic setup videos for one of the TVs made by the same brand as the TV you own that way you can see where you need to go to make adjustments next let's talk about picture presets I advise most folks to avoid picture modes like vivid or sports altogether these tend to be blown out overly bright and nowhere close to accurate in color they come off really flashy at first but these modes tend to work best in show rooms where the brightest TV often gets chosen over others they are not optimized for home use I personally prefer starting with the movie cinema or calibrated mode these are universally the most accurate out of the box and they will get you a slightly darker picture with warmer colors also if you're buying a 2020 model TV you may find it has filmmaker mode and this is a new picture preset that's supported by Hollywood industry tights and will be the most accurate out of the box picture preset at least for people who are watching at dark rooms on top of that some advanced TVs have day and night modes and these are usually only for the cinema movie or calibrated presets for instance some Vizio TVs have a calibrated and calibrated dark mode if you tend to watch TV in a dark room then the darker mode might be the way to go but if you watch with the lights on or Sun pouring through the windows or just prefer a brighter picture definitely start with the standard calibrated mode now if you pick one of these presets and it doesn't suit you right away don't worry we can make some adjustments to get it to your liking but if you really want to start with another picture preset like standard or natural you can do that too you probably like that mode because it's brighter and the colors are cooler and if that's how you roll more power to use no matter which mode you pick you probably want to turn any kind of motion smoothing off motion smoothing helps with fast-moving sports but it makes everything look well just weird we call this soap-opera effect and you would be surprised how many people think it's a byproduct of HD or 4k resolution it isn't so on the Samsung TV you want to find auto Motion Plus and turn these off depending on the TV you have it'll be called something else if you have any trouble figuring out what your brand of TV calls its motion smoothing feature check out our article about soap opera effect at Digital Trends calm where we dig into that a little bit further now some of you can just stop right there if you pick a movie / cinema / calibrated / filmmaker mode and make sure motion smoothing is off you're already in a really good place if you want a brighter picture bump up the backlight setting and maybe tinker carefully with the contrast not necessarily the brightness though juicing that up too high can wash out your picture now if you want to keep tweaking other things you might want to do is turn off all digital picture enhancements like digital clean view or MPEG noise reduction these usually cause more harm than good so just turn them off also enhanced contrast is something you generally don't want to be turned on this is another type of digital processing you don't benefit from and look if you aren't sure whether you should turn something off experiment and see if it does something you like or dislike and if you can't tell the difference chances are you can just turn it off next sharpness now if this isn't the most misleading setting I don't know what is oddly enough turning sharpness up degrades the picture quality it's a form of digital edge enhancement and it can create white lines around objects you don't necessarily have to turn it all the way down but keep it on the extremely low side more importantly just never turn it up let's look at local dimming control that's how your backlight system works again different manufacturers call this by different names but I have found that generally a low to medium setting works best when you turn it to the max you can get artifacts like halos and light bleed this is just another example of how it doesn't pay to crank things to the max because you generally don't get the desired result fortunately if you picked movie cinema calibrated mode this setting is probably correct out of the box for other modes you'll probably need to back it down next let's talk about the brightness and contrast controls these are a bit tricky in that you want to strike a balance between having deep dark blacks but you don't want to obscure shadows here is we're having a test disk or test pattern can help you out ideally in SDR mode you want to see all the bars in this grayscale pattern if we adjust too far in either direction Y there turns a black bar gray or turn the gray bar black what we want is a balance that shows us everything and with that we have successfully made adjustments for SD our picture quality for at least one input and I say this because with some TVs adjusting picture settings while tuned to HDMI one for example doesn't mean the other HDMI ports will have the same settings and it almost certainly means that your streaming apps don't have the same settings so you may have to jot down your settings and make adjustments to the other HDMI ports or if you're lucky you have and apply to all inputs option like we do on this Samsung eighty even if you do have that option you will probably want to start a show on Netflix or some other streaming app make sure it is not in HDR and copy your preferred settings over again this is whether you're just gonna pick your favorite picture mode or dig in and make other adjustments now what about HDR well put simply HDR is far more complicated and deserves its own video what I will say for now is that if you get your SDR settings done well then the HDR mode your TV picks will probably suit you well too if you are finding that isn't the case well you'll need to wait for the HDR picture settings video now you may be wondering why I didn't go into adjusting white balance or color and the reason why I'm not going there is the same reason why I don't publish detailed picture settings with my TV reviews every TV is different so the picture settings to which I arrive if I do a professional calibration on this TV probably would not be the best options for your particular TV even if it's the exact same make and model see when we get into deep Corrections like that a little bit of adjustment makes a big difference and each adjustment has a sort of ripple effect which throws other stuff out of whack which that needs to be corrected in short if you want that level of calibration I suggest hiring a calibrator who will take measurements make adjustments then measure again and so on until your TV is optimized hey everybody thanks as always for watching if you found this video useful like subscribe hit that notification bell and as always visit digital trends calm for the latest tech news and reviews you

Channel: Digital Trends

Views: 1,435,866

Keywords: best tv settings, best tv settings for movies, tv settings, picture quality, how to, best tv setup, best tv setup for bedroom, best tv settings for gaming vizio, tv calibration, tv calibration video 4k, tv calibration video, how to calibrate, how to calibrate a tv at home, how to calibrate a tv picture, how to calibrate a tv yourself, lg, vizio, samsung, sony, vizio m series, tcl 6 series

Id: MaetmBRaP1M

Length: 8min 16sec (496 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020