Ideally, a TV should be able to display deep blacks without losing the near-black detail within the darkest areas.

And that’s critical for getting top picture quality. Whether that happens or not, your next steps remain the same.īrightness: This is also called black level-and that’s a better term because it controls how dark the picture’s darkest areas can get, not the overall brightness. On some sets, if you try to change the TV settings, your picture mode will automatically change to a “custom” or “preference” mode. Once you’ve selected one of the preset picture modes, almost all TVs let you tweak the picture’s appearance further. We’ve found this comes close to our own optimized settings, though we often raise the brightness just a bit, because Filmmaker Mode assumes you’ll be watching in a very dark room. Some TVs, from brands including Hisense, LG, Samsung, and Vizio, have a feature called Filmmaker Mode, which automatically adjusts the TV’s settings to show films as the directors intended when a movie is played.

Instead, we’ve found that modes with names such as “cinema,” “movie,” and “expert” generally provide the best results. Also stay away from the “vivid” and “dynamic” modes, which tend to overemphasize contrast and sharpness and lower brightness too much. It could artificially boost brightness, contrast, and colors, and turn on motion smoothing (more on that below).

Our advice: Don’t choose “sports” mode for watching sports-or for anything else. All TVs now come with a menu of picture modes with names such as “vivid,” “natural,” “sports,” and “cinema.” When you select one of these modes, the brightness, contrast, and sharpness are automatically adjusted to preset values.

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