I care about the environment as much as the next person, but when you want to reduce your impact through energy-saving, there has to be some reasonable trade off. You wouldn’t be happy with an eco-friendly freezer failing to freeze your food, so why an eco-friendly TV that sucks at being a TV?
The fact is that your TV isn’t just using a lot of power for no reason, and reducing the power it uses will reduce its performance. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use “eco-mode” or whatever it’s called on your set, but that you might want to turn it off or adjust it under certain conditions. So let’s look at how eco-mode hurts your picture quality, and what that means for how you use your TV.
What Energy-Saving Mode Actually Does
Obviously, your TV uses less power from the wall when energy-saving features are activated, but how exactly does it do this? Well, the big one is reducing the brightness of the image. This simply means it converts less electricity into light (and heat) which reduces the amount of power you use. The biggest slice of the power budget goes to making photons, so it makes sense.
On top of this, the TV will also limit the peak brightness of HDR video, and will adjust your contrast, gamma, and motion settings to use less power. This can also include using less intensive image processing methods, which means the CPU cores in the TV don’t have to work as hard. If you have a high-refresh TV it may also run at a lower refresh rate while in energy-saver mode.
Why Your Picture Looks Dull
A darker image in a bright room is going to look dull and washed out. Eco-mode’s negative effect on picture quality is less evident in a dark room, but the negative effects on motion handling are visible in any situation. With the TV’s motion processing reduced, moving image may appear muddy and blurred compared to when the panel is running with all the bells and whistles enabled.
The Hidden Defaults Problem
If you’re using eco-mode on purpose, that’s one thing. However, while TVs in the past have generally been set to “torch mode” out of the box because this looks great on a brightly-lit TV showroom floor, the trend these days is to enable eco-mode by default. Which means that if you’ve never messed with your TV’s default settings, you may have been looking at a far uglier image than you paid for.
Turn eco-mode off, and turn off motion-smoothing while you’re at it. The difference is transformative, and you’ll wonder why you’ve been subjecting yourself to the dull and muddy picture this whole time.
Balancing Efficiency With Quality
Now, not using more power than you need is a good thing, and power bills are a factor too! The good news is that most TVs have energy-saving features that are broken up into different aspects, and different levels of aggression.
So, instead of turning it off completely, you can fine-tune your settings to get a great picture while still slicing a good chunk of power consumption compared to just letting the TV go bananas on electrons.
For example, you can set a maximum brightness level you’re comfortable with alongside an automatic brightness feature. So the TV will use its ambient light sensor to give you the optimal level of brightness for the room you’re in, without exceeding the cap you’ve set. Likewise, you can often set how aggressive the motion-based power-saving setting is, in which case you should set it to your preference.
When Energy-Saving Mode Might Be Worth It
Eco-mode has its uses, and you can enable it and disable it based on your needs and the content you’re watching. If you’re watching the news or a talk show, you can probably just leave it on. If you’re watching sport or an action movie, you’ll want to turn it off.
Using eco-mode for casual viewing can increase the lifespan of OLED TVs, it can reduce eye-strain in dark rooms, and some people might simply like the look of it. So use it if you like it.
For me, because I live in a country with frequent blackouts, I often have to run my TV on backup power. When you’re looking at eight hours with no TV and your portable power station only has so many Watt-hours, you need to trim the fat. With eco-mode, I’ve seen a massive reduction in power consumption, which means I can watch TV for long periods of time with no mains power. Just have a look at the difference between full power and power-saving.
This also matters if you’re running a TV in, for example, a boat or an RV, or if you use solar power to power your home.
There’s a worldwide drive to reduce power wasted by appliances, and that’s a good thing. However, you should have some say in what you sacrifice to go green, and if you paid for a TV with a great picture, you probably want to see it in all its glory!
- Brand
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Hisense
- Display Resolution
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4K
