Gaming has been Samarveer’s greatest passion, and the Literature graduate in him takes immense joy in dissecting games for their themes, messages, and impact. Samarveer holds a deep appreciation of gaming, and considers the platform to be the most immersive and impactful across all media. He can be found engaging with gaming communities online, always ready to debate the finer points of ray tracing or itching to write an 8-page collegiate thesis on any game that impacts him emotionally.
Earlier this year, I bought a 4K Mini-LED 120Hz TCL TV, but the moment I fired up a movie, everything felt a bit off. Characters' faces looked tan red, the whites looked distinctly bluish, and at night, the brightness of my TV threatened to blind me, while the TV was supposedly running its default picture settings.
If your TV looked fantastic on the shop floor and a bit of a dud in the living room, you aren't alone. To ensure a TV looks its best in a showroom, manufacturers play plenty of tricks. A TV doesn't play well with both environments, but thankfully, this mismatch can be fixed in just a matter of minutes if you know what you're doing.
The "Standard" TV mode is playing to the wrong audience
Showroom floors reward spectacle, not accuracy
When you walk into an electronics showroom to pick out a new TV, you'll find dozens, if not hundreds of TVs competing for customers' attention. This battle for attention happens to be under the brightest possible overhead lighting, too. Naturally, manufacturers want their displays to stand out, so they set showroom units to Standard and Vivid modes, which prioritize the highest possible brightness and the coolest color temperatures to make colors punchier.
Now, on the showroom floor, this is a genuinely reasonable sales tactic. Your living room, however, is a whole different ball game. Under dimmer home lighting, the same aggressive brightness becomes completely uncomfortable to look at, with colors appearing either unnatural or oversaturated, with no apparent middle ground.
That's not all, either. On the processing side, showrooms set TVs to the highest possible contrast to exaggerate differences between bright and dark areas. This crushes shadow detail and clips highlights, but those are accepted casualties in the war to be the most eye-catching screen on the floor.
Moreover, manufacturers play very carefully curated demo reels with oversaturated clips of fruit, flora, and fauna, all designed to make colors pop and highlights sparkle. These settings don't represent the actual movies, TV shows, and games you'll watch at home. That's why middling or unsatisfactory out-of-the-box performance is almost guaranteed unless you calibrate it to its new environment — your living room, your lighting setup, and your viewing angles.
Here's how to give your TV the picture settings it deserves
One single setting serves as a starting point for recalibrating your screen
There's a very easy way to improve your TV in seconds. Just switch from Standard or Vivid mode to Filmmaker Mode, Cinema, or Movie, depending on your TV. These picture presets usually prioritize accurate colors and much less intrusive processing, thus saving you from spending an evening poring over menus and hidden settings. As such, something like Filmmaker Mode is a great starting point.
However, Filmmaker Mode isn't a cure-all that makes every video look perfect. For instance, live sports, news broadcasts, and tons of YouTube videos don't follow the same rigorous color-grading standards as big-budget movies. Even with Filmmaker Mode, which, in practice, is designed around a creator's original standards, an OLED, Mini-LED, LCD, or QLED TV won't produce identical brightness and contrast detail.
Manually tuning your TV is the best possible method
This is how your TV can truly shine in the living room
Motion Smoothing is the next demon to tackle. Samsung calls it Auto Motion Plus, LG uses TruMotion, Sony calls it Motionflow, and TCL and Hisense just call it MEMC or Motion Smoothing. If you can't stand the floaty soap-opera effect, you can completely turn this feature off. I recommend taking manual control and setting Blur and Judder to 2 points each, which is particularly effective for live sports.
Another worthwhile adjustment is color temperature. Switch to Warm (or Warm 1/ Warm 2) if available. If the initial yellowish picture makes you question your eyesight, stick to Warm, since cooler settings often exaggerate blue tones. Other settings like dynamic contrast, artificial sharpening, and vivid-color enhancements can introduce more problems than they solve. These are trial-and-error settings, so disable them selectively and compare familiar content.
Lastly, to truly make your TV your own and help it adjust to your home and living room, adjust the light output to suit your room. It's best to disable any energy-saving dimming settings that cap the TV's maximum brightness, too. If your TV supports HDR, it's best to ensure that HDR content uses the appropriate picture profile. The best approach here is to make one change at a time. Your eyes need a moment to adjust, and your TV doesn't need every enhancement switched on to prove its worth.
Your TV has a few more tricks up its sleeve
Unlock the features hiding beyond picture settings
Once you've calibrated your TV's picture settings, it's time to check a few settings that can make your entire setup considerably more capable. The best place to start is Enhanced HDMI Mode, which a lot of users don't even know exists. Samsung calls it Input Signal Plus, while LG calls it HDMI Deep Color. You'll have to enable this mode by manually going into each HDMI port's individual settings, but it's worth the effort.
Enabling Enhanced HDMI on a compatible port unlocks higher-bandwidth features such as 4K at 120Hz, HDR, and VRR, and even better picture quality, provided, of course, your TV and connected device support these features.
Next, enable HDMI-CEC if you want compatible devices to control each other's power and input switching. Samsung calls it Anynet+, while LG uses SIMPLINK. It's a wonderfully mundane feature that saves you from juggling remotes and unifies your HDMI devices.
Lastly, check Game Mode, ALLM, and VRR for your console or PC, and verify that HDR or Dolby Vision is actually enabled where supported. Just remember that not every HDMI port supports every feature, and your TV's ambient-light sensor can still alter brightness behind your back.
Your TV deserves better than factory settings
We've become accustomed to treating our TVs as appliances that work best straight out of the box, but that assumption falls apart rather quickly once you start poking around the settings menus. If you've been putting off tweaking your TV because the prospect sounds boring (which it can be), consider this your excuse to finally get around to it. You might be surprised by how much more you enjoy the television you already own.