There are so many different settings on your TV, it’s hard to know which ones matter and which have a real effect on your viewing experience. Most are pretty self-explanatory, or you can just mess with the ones that aren’t and tell what they do by eye.
The sharpness setting, however, is one I feel a lot of people just ignore and leave at default settings. Which is a mistake, because, in my opinion, it’s one of the most impactful settings for perceived image quality on modern TVs.
What the Sharpness Setting Actually Does
Despite the name, the “sharpness” setting on your TV doesn’t actually make the picture any sharper. It’s not like there’s some magic AI technology adding in extra detail that isn’t there! In fact, sharpness has been a setting long before modern flat panels. Plenty of CRTs have it too.
It’s actually a form of artificial edge enhancement. This created a visible outline or a sort of halo around objects in the image that doesn’t exist in the original video. This can create the illusion that objects in the foreground of the picture are better defined, but that’s all it is—an illusion.
The Hidden Detail Problem
When you crank up the sharpness dial, your brain usually likes what it sees at first. You feel like things just got more “HD” all of a sudden. The problem is that this sharpness effect doesn’t come free.
Edge enhancement smooths over delicate features like skin pores, fabric weaves, or film grain. On 4K or 8K content, the effect is even worse, because all the subtlety you paid for gets erased under fake outlines.
Ironically, the higher-res a TV is, the worse high-sharpness looks. However, both of my CRT TVs, when playing retro video game content, look best with the sharpness setting turned off entirely. Especially when using better quality inputs like S-Video.
How Manufacturers Set Defaults Wrong
If sharpness ruins picture quality, why do TVs ship with it turned up? Simple: manufacturers want their sets to stand out on the sales floor. In vivid or standard modes, sharpness is usually cranked high, so the screen looks extra punchy at a glance.
That’s not so much of an issue anymore, since many people buy TVs online without seeing them in a showroom first, and it’s becoming more common to ship TVs with eco-mode on by default, which has its own issue.
Even in other more conservative image preset modes, I find that turning the sharpness down to zero has a positive effect on image quality. Honestly, if you’re watching 1080p or higher content on your TV, there’s no need for extra “sharpness”. Especially if it’s high-quality source material like Blu-ray or UHD Blu-ray. The bottom line is that this content is already plenty sharp with real detail.
Likewise, if you’re watching SD content, your TV’s upscaler is already doing a good job, and it’s unlikely the sharpness filter will make things better.
Finding the Right Sharpness Setting
For me, the best sharpness setting is almost always zero, but every person is different and there’s nothing wrong with you liking the look of sharpness or (shudder) motion smoothing.
So what’s the trick to getting sharpness right? I think the best way to dial it in is to use a calibration pattern or pause a piece of high-quality video. Lower the sharpness until the halos vanish, but fine textures remain crisp. Once you see the difference, it’s hard to go back to the exaggerated look.
When to Make Exceptions
There are situations where a little extra sharpness can help. Old DVDs, low-resolution streams, or fuzzy broadcasts may look slightly clearer with mild enhancement. Though, again, your modern TV probably has quite a few other ways to get better picture quality from lower-resolution content. That includes modern AI-enhancement, which can do the job more intelligently in most cases. Though AI-powered image enhancement has its own drawbacks, such as adding details that should not be in the image, because it misinterprets a scene.
If you like the look of a sharpening filter, who am I to argue? All I ask is that you try turning sharpness off and living with it for a while. You might be surprised that your TV was already set to add something like 5–10% sharpness out of the box or more if they were feeling sassy, so you might have been looking at an ugly edge-enhancing filter this whole time without knowing it.
