The budget TV picture settings you need to change for a premium picture ‣ Diverse Daily

To get an important thought out of the way, no, you can’t make any major upgrades to a TV through software. Through downloads, you might gain access to an AI assistant, some new apps, or expanded smart home functions, but it’s not like you can add 4K or HDR10+ to a TV that wasn’t already compatible. It’s akin to expecting a patch to add another 20mph to your EV (or PEV).

What you can do through settings is unlock your hardware’s existing potential. The stock configuration on your TV isn’t necessarily the best one, and you might be surprised at how much better it can perform if you move past a manufacturer’s conservative approach. TV makers are often more worried about whether something will work out of the box, period, than delivering the performance you thought you were paying for.

Filmmaker Mode

See it the way it was meant to be seen

Ripley facing off against the queen xenomorph in Aliens.

The picture modes most TVs default to might look impressive at first, but chances are, they’re wrecking your movies and TV shows. These ramp up aspects like brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness in a way that might grab your attention at the store, but actually destroys detail on closer examination. Worse, they may incorporate noise reduction and motion smoothing. The first may accidentally remove film grain, and smoothing often produces the garish “soap opera effect” that makes a Hollywood blockbuster look like a ’90s episode of General Hospital.

Filmmaker Mode is an industry-standard option that disables almost all post-processing and sets a specific white point. It’s probably more subdued than you’re used to, which ironically can be a little jarring. The tradeoff, though, is an image closer to what a director intended, and less of an assault on your eyes. You may catch nuances you missed in some of your favorite movies.

Admittedly, some people find the mode a little dim or flat even if they respect the intent. In that case, it may be best to treat the mode as a baseline, making your own tweaks from there. Remember also to take advantage of HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, if your streaming options support it. You’ll get brighter highlights and an expanded color gamut, which goes a long way to making images pop.

HDMI format

Why is this so often crippled?

The HDMI signal format menu on a Google-based TV.

You might assume HDMI ports would always perform as well as their specs say they should, but you’d be wrong. On many TVs, your inputs may be set to an overly conservative format that ensures compatibility, but doesn’t come anywhere near maximizing performance. Since I’ve never heard anyone complain about compatibility problems, I don’t understand why this is so often the norm, especially with modern PCs and game consoles being so demanding.

Exact options are going to depend on your TV, its operating system, and port specs, but there should be obvious signs as to what to pick. In the example above for instance, you’d pick the option with Dolby Vision for a Blu-ray player or media streamer, or the one with VRR if you’re connecting a PC or console. You might alternately see a mode listed as supporting high refresh rates (120Hz and up), which is probably also geared with PCs and consoles in mind.

If you’re not familiar, VRR stands for Variable Refresh Rate. The feature syncs refresh rates to framerates, which isn’t essential if you’re watching Johnny Mnemonic on Blu-ray, but becomes enormously important if you’re playing Cyberpunk 2077. A movie or show is typically going to stay locked at 24 or 30 frames per second — apps, however, can be all over the board, especially if they’re pushing rendering technology to the limit. If there’s a mismatch between refresh and framerates, it’s going to result in visual artifacts like screen tearing.

Remember that for anything involving VRR or high refresh rates in general, you need to use an HDMI 2.1 (or 2.2) port and cable combo. HDMI 2.0 doesn’t support VRR, or 4K refresh rates over 60Hz.

Ethernet

You may need a workaround

In most circumstances, the Wi-Fi on your TV (or media streamer) is going to be fine for network access. Wi-Fi 6 or higher will deliver plenty of speed, whether you’re streaming 4K HDR video or downloading an OS update. I’d argue that Wi-Fi 7 should already be de facto, but manufacturers can be very stingy with connectivity, so I’ll take what I can get.

Any version of Wi-Fi is susceptible to two threats, however: interference and range. If your router is in another room, or has a lot of obstacles in the way, its signal might become weak or drop out entirely in some scenarios. In an apartment building, it might have to compete with rival wireless traffic.

Ethernet eliminates these concerns by establishing a wired pipeline. On top of that, speeds are liable to be more consistent, which is almost more important when streaming than peak capacity. If you’re at 600Mbps one second but a fraction of that the next, your TV may have to stop and rebuffer video, or even drop its quality to keep going.

One catch here, apart from stringing Cat 6 around your home, is that corporate stinginess means your TV or media streamer might have a 100Mbps Ethernet jack instead of gigabit. You can work around this by connecting an Ethernet adapter to one of your TV’s USB ports, although you’ll need USB 3.0 or better to achieve 1Gbps. USB 2.0 caps you at 480Mbps.

Color depth (and/or chroma subsampling)

The wonderful world of HDR

When you’re watching content in SDR (standard dynamic range), what you’re looking at is 8-bit color. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, and indeed I’ve seen some pretty spectacular results in movies like Samsara or The Color of Pomegranates.

Once you switch to HDR, though, switching to 10-bit color is essential if you want to see an extended color palette with superior gradients. Your TV or media streamer may already be set to 10-bit, or configured to switch automatically — but it’s worth doublechecking that, and perhaps forcing 10-bit if you know everything you watch is going to support HDR.

If you’re using a PC or console, 4:2:0 chroma can make small text hard to read, and produce other odd effects.

You can if you like try 12-bit color, but that’s largely pointless. No TV supports rendering 12-bit at the moment, so at best you’ll get more accurate processing for Dolby Vision or HDR10+. That also generates 68.7 billion shades, which is far more than human vision can register.

While not strictly necessary, you might also want to check into chroma subsampling rates. If your TV is set to 4:2:0 or 4:2:2, that means there’s some color compression going on. It doesn’t (usually) matter much if you’re watching Netflix or YouTube, but if you’re using a PC or console, 4:2:0 can make small text hard to read, and produce other odd effects. Those devices should always be paired with 4:4:4 if possible, since that eliminates color compression entirely.