9 tips to improve the TV picture

Nothing beats sitting on the couch and watching a movie, right? Improving the TV image will make this experience even better, so we've separated some tips. These adjustments can be made by anyone and even with the differences from one manufacturer to another, you will be able to take advantage of all of them.

The point here is that even if you have the best TV on the market, it may not have the best picture setting by default. With series like Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power e The Dragon House being launched in streams, you don't want to miss out on everything your beautiful TV has to offer. This can be resolved with an image setup. Let's get to the topics.

Choose the correct picture mode

You may have noticed that your TV has several picture modes. These modes transform various details on the screen, often in a negative way. If you bought the TV and never touched it, it should be in a mode called “Standard, Vivid, Dynamic, Bright” or something similar to that.

The problem is that most of the time these conventional modes serve very well to highlight the TV in stores, but when using them at home, they are not the best option.

The tip to adjust the image in this case is to switch to the mode called Cinema, Content, Calibrated ou Filmmaker. These names will vary by manufacturer and you will likely feel a slight difference in the image details, as well as a more realistic feeling to them. If your intention is to play, we will talk more about it in the last tip.

Backlight and how to configure it

The “backlight”, loosely translated, means backlight. This picture setting is basically for controlling the light intensity of your TV. In the settings, you will only find the same by the name “backlight” on LCD TVs. On newer TVs, however, it might be called brightness same and in some cases OLED lights.

The important thing is that you know how to adjust the image with this setting. If you set this brightness too high, it will give you a headache, spend more energy and in some cases, ruin your TV faster. If you leave this brightness too low, it won't help either, leaving the image dark and difficult to see anything.

The ideal is to adjust this brightness according to where you place your TV. Logically, the more light the room has, the higher the brightness will have to be, while darker rooms will do better with a lower brightness setting.

With OLED TVs, one thing that scares people is the fear of the so-called burn-in, where it gets smudged from the burned pixels in that area. Too high brightness can contribute to the problem. Despite this, with conventional use of them, even at maximum brightness, this is unlikely to happen.

Contrast

Contrast is used to adjust the image in the white balance and in the brightest parts. That is, it serves to define how bright a bright part of an image will be. Take for example clouds, snow or any other shiny object. If you make the contrast too high, they will lose detail. Just like the brightness, if it's too low, it will have the opposite effect, leaving things dark and lifeless.

To improve the TV picture with good contrast, the best way is to use pictures with lots of bright points of interest. Good examples to improve the TV image with the contrast is to take a scene where we have snow or clouds, since if we leave the “effect” too high, they will disappear or just turn into an intense glow and without details.

Once you've chosen an image that you find interesting, do the following: increase the contrast level until you feel the details are fading. When you feel that the clouds are no longer clouds or that the snow is just a random glow, lower the contrast level until you see the details again. That must be the sweet spot.

In some cases the manual result can end up leaving everything a mess and nothing as expected. In these cases, you can use the Cinema ou Movie.

Brightness or black level

Different from backlight that we talked about earlier, this image setting does not control the light intensity, but the black part of the screen. If you leave this to the maximum, the image will be washed out and if it is set too low, it will take away details in the shadows and in the darkest parts of the image.

Even though it seems controversial, the image setting in the “brightness” issue is not used to control the brightness of the screen itself, but how black a dark part of the screen will look. We can even say that this adjustment is the “contrast”, but instead of focusing on what is bright, it focuses on the dark parts. On some TVs, this setting is called black level, which makes even more sense.

A good tip when adjusting the image with its black level is to do the opposite of what we did with the contrast. In addition, the franchise Alien e O cavaleiro das trevas are great films to assist in setting the contrast.

What we have to do here is lower the black level until everything disappears into the darkness — or comes close. After that, just go up until you start to see the details of the image, but without it looking washed out. Other good scenes to set the black level are scenes with people with long hair with a backlight. The backlight at the bottom of the hair will start to gain detail as you reach the sweet spot of “glow”.

Sharpness

This function is for you to control the artificial level of sharpness that will be placed on the image. When too high, it will take away details and add a hole in the fine lines. One curious thing about this sharpness, is that it doesn't actually increase how sharp an image looks. In fact, what happens with this image setting is that it increases the finer details of the image.

As a result, the higher the sharpness, the thicker the fine details of the image become, in addition to starting to have a horrible noise in it, making everything more blurry and similar to crayons. In general terms, this sharpness is nothing more than a processing filter also known as Edge Enhancement (Edge Enhancement, in free translation).

Even though it may not seem very intuitive, the best thing to do when configuring the Sharpness is to make it very low. On some TVs, the recommendation is to leave it at 0 and on others around 10%. In case you are already used to the ways Dynamic e Vivid, you will feel a huge difference when you lower the sharpness. However, when testing high quality content, you will see that things are much more detailed, especially in clothes, hair, beards and even facial details.

color and hue

These two adjustments are for controlling the color saturation and the green and red levels of your TV. It's a setting that comes from analog TVs and is usually already well configured by default, especially if you're using the Cinema ou Content. You can even tweak it if you think it's necessary, but it's probably not going to improve the TV picture—or worse.

Color Temperature / White Balance

With color temperature, the story is already different. As the name implies, this image setting is used to define how hot or cold the TV image will be. She is also known as white balance and it is one of the most difficult to adjust for the simple fact that our dear brain is confused by the small changes we make.

If you are already used to warmer tones and decide to change to a cooler tone, you will feel that it is “wrong” and vice versa. An example of this is when you use the modes Cinema e Content. They make the color much warmer.

The controversy is that in most TVs this would be the most realistic and exact option. Yes, you've gotten used to cooler tones on TVs for years, but I strongly recommend that you change your TV to a warmer tone. It will be something very strange at first, but after a few days, I guarantee you will start to find the bluish tones strange and you will still be watching content with much more fidelity.

Motion Smoothing (Novel Effect)

The soap opera effect is nothing more than a control of how “smooth” the image movements will be. The point is that this feature comes with the intention of improving the TV image, making everything smoother, but in practice it is not quite like that.

If we take most TV series and movies, we see that they are shot at 24 or 30 frames per second. TVs are currently all 60Hz and above and this is no problem and is even beneficial for when we are going to play games, especially. What comes into conflict is when motion smoothing is activated, forcing media produced at 24 or 30 fps to run much smoother, taking away all the immersion it should provide.

In live action sports and games, the feature may work better, but it's not ideal either. That's because in sports the smoothing algorithm gets confused due to the action speed too fast, creating blur on the screen. In games, the "soap opera mode" causes a input lag — that is, the time it takes the action to register on the screen — enormous to smooth the screen and destroy the experience. That said, whenever possible, disable image smoothing mode.

game mode

Last but not least, we have the game mode and perhaps one of the most darlings today. With this image setting enabled, the input lag will decrease, transforming the experience and probably making you a little better at gaming.

However, it is not a mode for you to leave it on all the time, as it disables several TV processing functions, which can affect the image quality in movies and series. The ideal thing is that you activate this option only when you are going to play, so you can enjoy the maximum available FPS and a lower input lag.

Finally, a final tip is to check if you are using a good HDMI when playing games and if you have a good internet speed to play 4K videos. Did you like these tips? Do you think something is missing? Comment there and don't forget to check out our many other articles here on showmetech.

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Looking to buy a new TV? see the Samsung's 2022 lineup of TVs and soundbars.

Source: CNET