9 TV Settings That Instantly Boost Picture Quality – BGR

There’s a good chance the picture quality you see on your TV right now isn’t at its best. Generally, TVs aren’t set up to deliver the best possible picture quality in your home with their factory settings. Instead, by default, they’re set up to be eye-catching under store lights to captivate shoppers and encourage them to buy. This approach works well for TV brands when we, as buyers, walk past a wall of screens and get drawn to their bright colors and sharp edges popping across an aisle.

However, the same TV settings don’t necessarily work well in typical home lighting when you’re watching from the couch. It is possible to use a calibration setup disc to achieve more accurate settings or hire a professional TV calibrator to adjust the TV settings for you. Both options can help, but they usually cost hundreds of dollars. That might be too much to spend only to make a TV look better.

Thankfully, in many cases, picture quality can improve noticeably with just a few changes to your TV settings that you can make yourself. If most of your viewing happens on Netflix, there are also a few Netflix settings worth adjusting. More often than not, picture quality is subjective. That’s why it’s worth taking the time to try the settings mentioned below on your own before resorting to other means.

It doesn’t take long to see a difference in your TV’s picture quality just by switching to a different picture mode. You can do it in a few minutes with a couple of button presses on the remote. Leaving picture mode presets alone is a common mistake to make when buying a new TV. Various TV brands give the same preset mode different names. 

There’s a high possibility your TV is set to one of the Standard, Dynamic, Bright, or Vivid modes if you’ve never changed picture mode settings. With these settings, whites lean towards a cooler tone with a slight bluish tint. Moreover, colors can look oversaturated, especially reds and blues. The highlights stand out more, and edges can appear sharper. It can start to feel unnatural after some time. A few may prefer this specific look, especially for sports or daytime viewing in a bright room. Others might feel these modes don’t show the picture quality as intended, particularly when watching cinematic content. 

For better picture accuracy, switch to one of the Cinema, Movie, Expert, or Filmmaker modes. In these modes, extra processing is kept to a minimum. On screen, they provide a calmer and more natural look. The modes may feel somewhat restrained at first if you’re switching from a vivid or dynamic mode. Specifically, the contrast might seem toned down, while the colors look less aggressive. However, you’ll notice more details in the shadows. That said, not a single picture mode is suitable for every situation. Therefore, it is better to switch between various modes that adjust picture parameters differently. Some will deliver better picture quality at night. Meanwhile, others perform better during the day. Ultimately, trust your eyes and see what works best for your viewing.

The motion setting differs slightly from picture modes, but it affects the image presentation just as much. Instead of changing the picture parameters, this setting focuses on movement. On many TVs, the motion processing is on by default. TV brands give it different names depending on which menu you’re looking at. The result on the screen is essentially the same in the end. Motion interpolation works by creating extra frames to smooth out movement in a way that wasn’t part of the original video.

Camera pans appear extra smooth, making movements glide across the screen. Movies can start to feel like daytime soap operas. That’s where the nickname Soap Opera Effect comes from. This setting tends to divide viewers. Some don’t mind it. A few even prefer it. Notably, live sports can look more fluid with extra smoothness. However, with movies and TV shows, the reaction flips. Directors and cinematographers have been vocal about this for years. Even top creators like the Stranger Things co-creator insist on turning it off.

It is largely because the motion no longer behaves the way they planned when shooting the scene. That pushback is one of the reasons certain TVs now include picture modes meant to reduce motion processing. Therefore, it’s important to know when this setting is useful. There are situations where you might want it enabled, and others where it actively harms the content. As a rule of thumb, leave it off for movies and turn it back on for sports.

Simply put, the Backlight is how much light the TV displays. It doesn’t change the picture parameters themselves. For instance, contrast, colors, and brightness settings remain untouched. However, it affects the screen’s brightness. Most TVs refer to it by different names. On LCDs, it’s usually called Backlight. On OLEDs, you might see it named as OLED Light, which shows how backlighting differs between cheap and expensive TVs. Some TV models even use the word Brightness for it. However, the backlight works differently from the normal Brightness control in the settings menu.

When you turn it up, the screen looks brighter, and bright areas can start to lose detail. It can sometimes be almost glaring if the room has dimmer lighting. On the other hand, when you turn it down, dark scenes may appear deeper with less glare. During daytime viewing, you’ll probably want a higher backlight. This ensures the image doesn’t get lost in ambient light. At night, lowering it would make blacks appear deeper and reduce eye strain.

Additionally, higher light output can use more energy. In extreme cases, it also increases the risk of image retention, though that’s usually not an issue for typical viewing. There are also a few ways you might be unintentionally ruining your TV without realizing it. Backlight is one of the easiest ways to make your screen feel brighter or darker without changing the actual picture processing. All in all, we would suggest adjusting it depending on the room’s lighting rather than leaving it fixed.

Sharpness is one of those settings that gets misunderstood a lot. Turning it up doesn’t add detail. What it actually does is look for edges in the picture and exaggerate them. You can think of it as the TV drawing outlines around objects that are already there, and making them pop more. It changes how edges appear, not how much detail exists. On screen, the effects are easy to notice. Turn it down or off, and the picture feels softer.

At first look, it can feel like the image is lacking something, but that softness is closer to what the source actually contains. In the background, the TV is simply boosting contrast along edges. It adds artificial outlines wherever there’s a shift between light and dark. Therefore, high sharpness doesn’t equal better accuracy. It can be tricky because too much sharpness can actually hide details. This is why adjusting sharpness to the max often backfires. With movies or shows, extra sharpness tends to hurt more than it helps.

Cinematic content is already highly detailed, and boosting edges can disrupt textures or exaggerate film grain.  Most of the time, TVs look more natural with sharpness turned down, sometimes even to zero. That said, some models might need a small adjustment to keep the image from feeling too soft, but you should gradually increase it. The guideline is to notice how it changes the picture and find what feels right to your eyes.

The color temperature setting adjusts how warm or cool the picture can look. Turning it down, the image gets a bit reddish and yellowish. If you turn it up, the image will start appearing a bit blue. At the same time, white balance is the more detailed setting. It lets you adjust red, green, and blue in the image separately by shifting the overall hue. Almost all TVs have this setting somewhere in the menu. You’ll see names like Warm, Cool, Normal, or even a custom white balance option.

Most viewers never adjust this setting. TVs are often set up with a cooler tone out of the box with the purpose of looking flashier in an electronics store. Therefore, when you adjust the color temperature or switch to a mode that’s actually more accurate, such as Movie, it might feel too warm at first. This happens just because your eyes aren’t used to it. By giving it a day or two, the settings should start feeling normal.

Notably, warmer settings often feel soft and a little easier on the eyes. On screen, skin tones feel more natural and give bright whites a yellowish tint. On the other hand, cooler settings can display crisp whites and a slightly bluish cast that can make skin look washed out. Ultimately, we suggest you experiment and find the right balance for your eyes and viewing habits. Going too far in either direction can make the picture start to feel unnatural.

The Brightness setting on the TV controls the black levels in the picture. As opposed to what the name indicates, it doesn’t change how much light comes from the panel. Instead, it adjusts how deep the dark areas can look. Increasing it brightens the shadows. After that, you can start seeing details that were previously hidden in dark scenes. However, if it is set too high, the black can begin looking gray. The image can start losing detail as shadows merge. Turning it down makes the blacks deeper. The night scenes will look more realistic.

That said, you might miss details in the dark parts of the picture if it is set too low. Behind the scenes, adjusting Brightness basically controls the black point of the image. The TV rebalances the darker tones, leaving the bright areas largely untouched. Here, contrast and color aren’t directly affected. It’s just how the dark areas behave that changes. This is why subtle calibrations often make a more impactful difference than taking settings to extremes.

Finding the right value means balancing it with your room lighting. You can raise the Brightness until shadow detail is visible without the blacks looking washed out. Brighter rooms might allow you to push it a little higher than normal. In comparison, it would be better to keep it lower in darker rooms. For most cinematic content, a lower, balanced Brightness usually works best. It’s a subtle control, but getting it right can drastically boost picture quality.

Contrast controls how bright the brightest parts of the image appear, without touching the dark areas that Brightness or Black Level handles. It shifts how the whites appear on your screen. You’ll find it in almost every TV menu, though some professional TVs might call it White Level. If you push it too far, those highlights turn white. Then the picture quality loses subtle textures in clouds, snow, or other light surfaces.

To get a sense of where it should be set, you want something on screen with lots of bright areas that have detail. After adjusting it, highlights should show detail, instead of just being a featureless white. Once you’ve got a good test scene, turn the contrast up until you notice the bright areas starting to lose detail. Then turn it down until you can see that detail again. That sweet spot might vary depending on the content. Therefore, you may need to adjust it while watching different shows or movies.

Some TVs already do a decent job out of the box with expert picture modes. That’s often enough for casual viewing. Nevertheless, understanding what the setting does helps if you want to fine-tune it further. Essentially, contrast or white level is all about preserving highlight detail while allowing bright areas to retain visual impact. Adjust it until the features in bright elements are visible, then you’ve found the optimal balance.

HDR gets mixed in with the rest of the picture settings. However, it doesn’t really behave like one. With it, you’re not adjusting a slider up or down. What actually happens here is that when enabled, the TV switches into a different way of reading the signal altogether. It expands the usable range between the darkest and brightest parts of the picture. The result is that dark areas hold onto a deeper texture. Meanwhile, bright elements can be more vibrant.

Without HDR, highlights tend to blend into the rest of the scene. Many TVs change their entire behavior instead of just adjusting a single parameter when they detect that signal. The purpose is to give them more room to work with the extra information in the signal. HDR content is often displayed brighter and with finer color detail than some TVs can actually fully reproduce. At times, the panel cannot produce what the signal requests.

The TV decides what to keep bright and what to compress so the image still looks coherent. This same process can vary a lot from one TV to another. For this reason, HDR can feel impressive on one display while not so amazing on another. Adjusting individual control settings can also behave differently when HDR is active. Some TVs don’t let you tweak certain settings, whereas others allow you. Regardless, keep HDR enabled if the content supports it.

The Energy Saving setting doesn’t try to make the image look better or more accurate. Instead, it works as a limiter on your TV, often resulting in a decrease in picture quality. Most TVs save energy by restricting how bright the panel is allowed to get. Sometimes it’s a limit on the backlight. Other times, it adjusts itself automatically . Either way, the decision-making isn’t in your hands, as the TV is constantly adjusting things in the background.

That’s usually why the image starts to feel a bit dull with Energy Saving enabled. For instance, bright highlights are the first thing to lose impact. The picture can feel oddly flat regardless of whether you’ve changed contrast or the color settings. One minor inconvenience is its inconsistency. This isn’t a fixed adjustment that stays unchanged once you set it. This approach also makes calibration a headache. Any change you make while it’s enabled will work against the TV that keeps changing the output.

This is quite evident in HDR content, which relies on higher peak brightness to emphasize highlights. In comparison, Energy Saving does the opposite. Therefore, it is generally recommended to disable this setting before adjusting other picture parameters. Doing so helps because it can be difficult to improve a TV’s picture quality when something else is steering the wheel. After trying the settings above, if you still decide it’s time for an upgrade, there are plenty of ways to put an old TV to use.