Don’t ignore this Fire Stick setting if you want better picture quality ‣ Diverse Daily

When I first plugged my Fire TV Stick 4K Max into my LG TV, I immediately noticed something was off about the picture quality. All the colors in the menus looked washed out, and when I was watching certain shows and movies, the colors looked dull and overly bright, which clearly wasn’t how they were supposed to look.

Naturally, the first place I looked to try to fix the problem was my TV’s picture settings. I tried changing the Picture Mode and adjusting the HDR brightness, but neither made much of a difference. That’s when I quickly realized it wasn’t my TV causing the issue, but my Fire TV Stick itself.

The culprit? By default, whenever a Fire TV Stick is connected to an HDR-compatible TV, a setting called “Always HDR” is enabled. As the name suggests, it forces your Fire TV Stick to output HDR (High Dynamic Range) at all times. If you’re watching HDR content, this likely won’t affect your experience much at all. But if you’re navigating the menus on your Fire Stick, such as the home screen, or watching content that doesn’t support HDR, that’s where it can create a frustrating problem. Forcing HDR output onto content mastered only in SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) can cause the colors on your TV to look washed out, dull, and gray.

If you’ve encountered this issue with your Fire TV Stick and are tired of looking at washed-out colors on your TV, fortunately, the solution is quite simple. In fact, it’s something Amazon really should have enabled by default on its Fire TV Sticks: a setting called “Adaptive HDR.” Here’s how it works and how to enable it.

How to enable Adaptive HDR on your Fire Stick

The best of both worlds

What makes Adaptive HDR such a game-changer is that it only makes your Fire TV Stick output HDR when the content you’re watching actually supports it. So, if you’re simply navigating the menus or scrolling through the home screen, your Fire TV Stick won’t be trying to force HDR, meaning the colors will look vivid as they should, rather than washed out. The same goes for shows and movies that don’t support HDR.

But the moment you start watching something that supports HDR, such as more modern shows and movies, your Fire TV Stick will automatically switch to HDR output, letting you watch it in full HDR, as intended.

The result is much better picture quality overall, with HDR that actually adapts to the content you’re watching rather than being unnecessarily forced on all the time.

Best of all, switching from Always HDR to Adaptive HDR only takes a few seconds on your Fire TV Stick. Here’s how to do it, step by step:

1. Open the Settings menu on your Fire TV Stick. You can easily do this by pressing the Settings button (gear icon) on your remote.

2. From there, navigate to Display & Audio > Display.

3. Select Dynamic Range Settings.

4. Choose Adaptive.

Once you’ve switched to Adaptive, your Fire TV Stick will now automatically only display HDR when the content actually supports it.

Alternatively, if the TV your Fire TV Stick is hooked up to is older and doesn’t have the best HDR picture quality, you can also select Disable HDR if you’d rather just turn it off entirely and stick with SDR.