Your 4K TV won't look its best out of the box. Modern TVs are often optimized for showroom floors, using features that distort picture quality and cause eye strain. Even after turning off disruptive features, spending a few minutes calibrating your TV's display pays major dividends. You don't need a professional tool to make visible improvements.
Many TVs support Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and other picture enhancements. Ensuring these modes activate for supported content can massively improve your viewing experience. Change the picture mode and turn off motion smoothing. Your TV likely has several picture modes: vivid, gaming, sports, etc. These are bundled presets that adjust levels for different content types. For instance, gaming modes optimize for low latency, while vivid modes crank up brightness, saturation, sharpness, and contrast for an eye-popping image—though not the most accurate one.
The first mode to look for is "movie" or "filmmaker" mode. These save time by turning off obnoxious visual settings like motion smoothing, as well as other post-processing and sharpness features. While suitable for sports, these are best avoided for movies and shows as they create strange visual artifacts. Filmmaker Mode is usually the best option, as it's an official specification endorsed by Hollywood directors such as Martin Scorsese and Denis Villeneuve. However, Filmmaker Mode is not available on all TVs. Movie mode can be different, but generally it has the same goal of making the picture look more natural. If your TV's movie mode doesn't turn off features like motion smoothing or action clarity, turn them off manually. At their worst, motion smoothing settings inject fake video frames, a misguided way of making low-frame-rate content play at higher ones. Movies play at 24 frames per second for a reason—it's part of what makes them feel "cinematic." Motion smoothing destroys the Hollywood magic, making movies look weird and somewhat oily. The "soap opera effect" is so reviled by cinephiles that Tom Cruise once filmed a PSA begging people to turn off their TVs' motion smoothing settings.
Meanwhile, don't forget to check the settings of attached devices like consoles or streaming boxes to ensure they're playing in 4K and outputting the best possible quality. After starting with a preset and removing post-processing or over-sharpening, work through the picture settings like brightness, contrast, and sharpness to dial them in one-by-one. Because of the way display panels are made, there can be enough variation between two of the same TV model that each needs to be tuned differently. The best way to do so is with a dedicated calibration tool, but most people don't have one. Don't worry: your eyesight is sufficient. While we can't detail the exact settings you should pursue, be sure to address black levels and brightness, white levels and contrast, sharpness, color temperature, color gamut, tint, and gamma. Consider using TV test patterns (such as this YouTube playlist of reuploaded professional calibration patterns) as you go to get a more objective sense of what you're adjusting. Turn off any eco mode settings (aside from the inactivity timer), as these almost always compromise picture quality by reducing brightness and similar. Eco settings don't actually save that much energy or money.
Source: Engadget · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing