Your OLED TV has its best picture mode hiding in plain sight ‣ Diverse Daily

When you’re in Walmart, Target, or Best Buy looking at the shiny new screens, it’s easy to be dazzled by the crisp and vibrant OLED display. They often feel like a cascading range of bold colors as the image shifts. In fact, I’ll bet that most people have seen the biggest trick in the book. You’re watching an OLED TV on the sales floor, mesmerized by a ballet of lights, colors, and sharp edges. Many times, a majestic underwater scene is playing out on screen, with fish of all colors passing by. You know that in that moment you have to nab an OLED for yourself to heighten the magic of your own home entertainment setup.

What you don’t know is that many times, the OLED TVs have color saturation and motion smoothing ratcheted up to level ten. In many cases, this is handled with one easy switch in picture mode. In most stores, LG TVs are usually set to vivid mode, and other brands use an equivalent. The truth is that these modes are designed to catch your attention and also shine brightly in light-dense areas like the sales floor of a major retailer. Vivid mode and modes similar to it across other brands heavily process colors to produce images that truly pop. These modes also use a technology that’s called “motion smoothing” to artificially fabricate extra frames in the image so that it seems like movement is buttery smooth. But in your own home, this mode will get old real fast.

The artificial problem

Pretend definition isn’t real definition

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever displayed on an LG QNED85 TV. — Black Panther in Vivid Mode

Grabbing your attention on the sales floor is one thing. But in practice, heavily processed images don’t do justice to the entertainment you’re consuming. Modes like vivid take a pure image and twist all the dials. Brightness is raised to accommodate any level of lighting in the room your TV might be in. Colors are ultra-processed with high contrast and saturation to appear far more intense and vibrant on screen. White spaces often skew toward cooler temperatures with bluish appearances. The image is sharpened, and other dynamic options for noise and contrast might be more aggressively applied.

When it comes to movement, motion smoothing is implemented to a high degree. If you ever looked at an OLED TV on display and wondered why everything had the illusion of moving either quickly or sharply, that’s because of motion smoothing. What happens is that each piece of entertainment that you watch is output at a certain number of frames per second (usually 24). Motion smoothing artificially creates frames in between the actual frames to make it seem like the image is being projected at a much higher frame rate than it actually is. It’s what many consider to be the “soap opera” effect. This is because soap operas are actually filmed at higher frame rates to produce a more real-time quality. When motion smoothing enacts the “soap opera” effect on your favorite movies, it feels like the quality of the cinematic production is cheapened.

The mode with movie buffs in mind

Watch movies with better image accuracy

Our everyday first-person perspective of the world is not in vivid mode. There is a reason that I refer to heavy processing as “artificial.” While this might be great for the playoffs or the Super Bowl, movies were never meant to be viewed in such a manner. The filtration skews the original vision of the filmmaker and studio. With that said, many OLED TVs have a mode that does just that. LG’s version is called filmmaker Mode. Switching to filmmaker mode might be jarring at first if you’ve gotten yourself used to vivid or more heavily saturated modes because filmmaker largely removes all of the filtration and manipulation of the image. The colors shown are accurate and true to the source. Motion smoothing is removed entirely. Whites are truly white, and blacks and shadows are deep and dark.

Let yourself adjust to filmmaker mode before instantly writing it off as inferior. You’ll notice that movies feel more authentic, almost like you’re at the theater. Now, I will offer one caveat. In a more well-lit room, filmmaker mode can be dark. These modes are better in a darkened room, much like a theater. However, using LG as an example again, if you’d like a mode that gets you closest to the most accurate image but maintains a better brightness level for average living rooms, cinematic mode is a great next option. You can toggle motion smoothing on this mode, and most other adjustments are removed with the exception of a brightness boost. Filmmaker mode is my favorite, and it’s one that you won’t see right out of the box. Don’t take my word for it. Give the mode a try and give it some time before you make a final determination. You might be pleasantly surprised.