5 quick ways to improve your TV picture in minutes
Whether you've just bought a new TV, had the same one for years or are looking to upgrade and wondering how to make the most of it, you'll always want it looking its best.
Most TVs are delivered in standard mode and this alone isn't always best for picture quality. Some even default to vivid or eco modes, which are even worse.
As you drill down into the menus you'll find dozens of options, but you don't need to be a calibration expert to improve your picture and these easy changes will help you boost your image quality.
Still deciding what TV to buy? See our reviews of the best TVs available now and find one that's perfect for you.
1. Turn off adaptive contrast
This can often be active by default, but it's something we rarely if ever turn on or leave on when we're tweaking TV settings to get the best picture.
It mucks with the brightness depending what's being displayed. Lots of white on screen will see the brightness shoot up because the TV thinks that's useful and it will go the other way when the screen is blacker.
These inconsistencies and overall unpredictably is not conducive to a stable, natural image.
Turn off adaptive contrast or set it to low, otherwise you'll notice some odd shifts in brightness, particularly in darker and brighter parts of the picture. You'll typically find adaptive contrast in the advanced picture settings menu.
2. Set noise reduction to low or off entirely
What's noise? Well it's got nothing to do with speakers, weirdly enough. Noise is where flat areas of colour look like they're moving. Like static.
You're probably now wondering why you wouldn't want your TV to reduce this, well unfortunately, there are side effects to noise reduction.
Reducing noise can remove detail too. It's like botox for the picture and smoothing out the lines, dots, peaks and valleys of the picture makes things look less natural.
You may find you want a little bit of smoothing though, finding a balance between noise reduction and the artificial smoothing that can come with it, but we wouldn't typically recommend setting it any higher than low.
A smoother picture sounds tempting, but it's not worth the loss of detail. Set noise reduction to off or low. As with adaptive contrast, you're most likely to find this in the advanced picture settings.
3. Sharpness isn't your friend
Another day, another counterintuitive picture setting. TV tech is always striving for sharper more detailed picture, that's the main reason we move to higher resolutions. SD to HD, HD to 4K and 4K to 8K all see a considerable jump in sharpness, but despite that, you shouldn't crank up the sharpness on your TV.
Far from turning a blurry image sharp, cranking this setting up high can actually mask detail. What your TV is actually doing is overemphasisining the contrast on the edges of objects to make them stand out more. These hard highlights make content look artificial and sometimes jagged and pixelated.
Like noise reduction, you may find that having some sharpness boost is preferable, but keeping it low or off altogether will give you a more natural and detailed image. You'll find the sharpness slider in your picture settings.
4. Understand your picture modes
Sport, movie and vivid picture modes all have one thing in common: you don't really need them. You should have your TV in standard and adjust the picture settings from there, either to how you like them, or using our guidance on getting the best TV picture, which has all picture settings we used for every TV we've tested.
We tweak the TVs, so the picture is as versatile as possible and will suit whatever you're watching, whether it's a football match, the news or Psycho.
- Sport mode will crank up motion smoothing, but can also negatively affect brightness and colour saturation.
- Vivid mode is typically how you'll see the TV displayed in stores. It's too bright and colourful for the home.
- Movie mode will reduce motion control and smoothing, and will make the colours much warmer. It's a less lifelike image.
There are arguments to be made for sport mode and the improvements to motion control, and movie mode if you want a more cinematic, dreamy image. Try them for yourself and see if you like the difference they make.
Ultimately though, we think setting your picture to look good for all content makes these modes largely redundant.
Set your picture settings up once, either using our TV picture recommendations or having a tinker and seeing what looks good to you, and then leave the picture modes alone.
5. Make sure your picture settings apply to all your inputs
Everyone should adjust their picture settings, and you can see what settings we used for the TVs we reviewed in our guide to getting the best TV picture.
Whether you go in deep on picture settings, pouring over every option, or you just follow the tips we've given here just make sure you copy these settings across all your inputs. If you don't then all your hard work will only apply to the input you adjusted the settings on. For most people, that's likely to be whatever input they use to watch broadcast TV.
Luckily, newer TVs will ask you if you want to copy the picture settings you've adjusted across all your inputs (basically all your HDMI inputs) so make sure you click yes. If your TV doesn't do this then, sorry, you'll need to set the picture settings yourself for each input you use.
Make sure your picture settings are the same across all your inputs so you're getting the same top-quality image regardless of what HDMI input you're using.
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