Buying a new TV is always exciting, especially if it’s your first smart TV. A smart TV opens up the world in a significant way, mainly by being able to watch all of your favorite shows and movies from Netflix, HBO Max, etc., all on the same device. Once you have all of these apps installed, you might think you could just sit down and start watching things. While that’s true, you’d be better served doing a few more things to make sure your TV is looking and running the best that it can be.

Settings don’t take a lot of time to change on your TV, but it can take a while if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Despite the time sink, it’s well worth the time, especially since you only have to do it one time and never worry about it again. I like having my shows and TVs look as good as they can, so don’t skip these steps.

Manage your picture settings

An important step

If you like to watch a lot of movies, then you owe it to yourself to tweak your settings. While your TV’s dedicated filmmaker mode might be good enough for you, I still like to make a custom option or just tweak the already existing options. For example, I like to change the brightness and contrast settings on my Movie mode and dial the numbers in to my liking. This is a lot easier if you’re in a room where you can control the light, because glares are no joke.

If you’re feeling particularly lazy, you can always look up the optimized settings from somewhere like RTINGS, but you’ll still want to tweak some things from there depending on how your room is laid out. None of this takes a lot of time, so if you have to pick just one thing from this list to do, this is the one I’d say is the most important.

Update your operating system

Stay up to date

This might be a step you can skip if your TV’s OS is already up-to-date out of the box. If it’s not, you should definitely give it an update, especially since you could be missing out on features. Let’s use my Sony X90J as an example real quick. When I bought it, it didn’t have VRR support. It eventually got it in a firmware update, so this shows the importance of updating your firmware. Typically, you don’t get big updates like that, but it’s still good practice to make sure it’s up-to-date.

Your OS being updated also means you’ll continue to have access to the latest streaming apps. Although your smart TV doesn’t receive updates as long as something like a Roku Streaming Stick does, it’ll still last you several years, so there’s no reason not to stay locked out of the newest apps because of not updating things.

Toggle those energy-saving modes off

You don’t need them

Unless you’re really concerned by how much power your TV is drawing, I would turn off every energy-saving mode that’s on your TV. These modes mean well, but they actually cause more harm than good, at least as far as your viewing experience is concerned. Energy saving means your TV will appear dimmer than it should, and that could prove costly in dark movies where you’re struggling to make out what you’re looking at.

My receiver has an eco mode like this, and what it ends up doing is making my subwoofer a lot quieter, which sort of defeats the purpose of what I bought it for in the first place. If you’re happy with how your TV looks with an energy-saving mode on, then by all means leave it on. I just want you to know that your picture quality is suffering because of it.

Use the correct HDMI port

Your ports do different things

Smart TVs are packed with HDMI ports, and if you’re lucky, you have one with 2.1 ports. At the time of this writing, that’s the most modern port, so there’s little way for you to go wrong with how you get things plugged in. The main thing you need to know is what your eARC port is all about. This is a port that gives you the highest quality sound that you can get, so if you have an audio receiver or soundbar, you should get it plugged into this port.

If you don’t have a sound system, then you can just treat this port as another HDMI port. You don’t get degraded performance or anything by using it with your PS5, for example. It’s only an issue when you have an audio device plugged into another port that should be utilizing the eARC port. For older TVs, this port might be called ARC, but you treat it the same way.