When you spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on a TV, you probably want it to look as good as possible. That means making sure your TV is as bright as it can be and delivers the sharpest, most vivid picture possible. Out of the box, most TVs are already most of the way there, but they often need a bit of fine-tuning to get the picture just right.
For instance, when I got my LG TV last year, I was immediately impressed by how sharp it looked when I powered it up for the first time. And since it was my first OLED TV, I was also awestruck by how incredible the colors looked. But I could still tell something was off right away: the TV just didn’t look as bright as I knew it could be. That’s when I remembered the automatic energy-saving features that virtually every smart TV has these days, which can have a pretty substantial impact on a TV’s brightness and overall vividness.
Simply put, if you’re after the brightest, most colorful picture your TV can produce, energy-saving features can be a roadblock. Here’s why TV makers have them enabled by default and, most importantly, how to turn them off to unlock your TV’s full potential.
What energy-saving modes do
Reduced power consumption at the expense of brightness
Depending on the type of smart TV you have, it can draw quite a bit of power. That’s why, to reduce energy consumption and meet regulatory standards in some countries, TV manufacturers often enable energy-saving or eco modes by default. While that’s helpful in theory and can lower your electricity bill, it can also hurt your TV’s picture quality. And if you just spent a bucketload of money on a new TV to get the best picture possible, that kind of defeats the whole point.
The biggest impact most power-saving modes have is on brightness. They typically dim your TV’s backlight or OLED panel to reduce energy use. Other energy-saving features may also use sensors built into your TV to detect how bright the room is and automatically adjust the brightness accordingly.
For example, my LG TV had two energy-saving features enabled by default: a picture mode called Auto Power Save and a feature called Energy Saving Step. Auto Power Save made my screen look dimmer, while Energy Saving Step uses a sensor to detect the room’s brightness. It lowers my TV’s brightness as the room gets darker and increases it as the room gets brighter. While this sounds useful, in practice I found my TV was never bright enough.
Most smart TVs have similar features, just under different names. You might see them called Energy Saving Mode, Power Saving Mode, Ambient Light Optimization, Energy Saving Step, or Eco Mode, but they all have the same basic goal: reduce energy consumption by lowering your TV’s brightness.
Quiz
TV display technology through the years
Trivia challenge
From bulky CRTs to cutting-edge Mini LED — how well do you know the screens that changed television forever?
Display TechHistoryPanelsInnovationBrands
What does CRT stand for, the technology used in most televisions before flat-panel displays took over?
Correct! A Cathode Ray Tube works by firing electrons from a cathode at a phosphor-coated screen to produce images. CRT televisions dominated living rooms from the 1950s all the way through to the mid-2000s before flat panels took over.
Not quite — the answer is Cathode Ray Tube. CRTs fire beams of electrons at a phosphor screen to light up pixels, a technology that dates back to the late 19th century. They were the backbone of home television for over half a century before LCD and plasma displays replaced them.
Which display technology uses individual pixels that can produce their own light AND switch off completely to achieve perfect blacks?
Correct! OLED, or Organic Light-Emitting Diode, is unique because every pixel is its own light source and can turn off individually. This means true blacks and an essentially infinite contrast ratio, which is why OLED panels are prized for cinematic picture quality.
Not quite — the answer is OLED. Unlike LCD-based technologies that rely on a separate backlight, OLED pixels generate their own light and can switch off completely. This produces true blacks and infinite contrast, setting OLED apart from most rival display technologies.
Samsung’s SQD-Mini LED technology, found in its premium 2025 QLED TVs, combines Mini LED backlighting with which other display enhancement to boost brightness and colour?
Correct! SQD-Mini LED pairs a highly precise Mini LED backlight — featuring thousands of tiny LEDs for granular local dimming — with a quantum dot colour filter. This combination delivers exceptional peak brightness, a wider colour gamut, and improved contrast compared to standard LED LCD panels.
Not quite — the answer is a quantum dot colour filter. Samsung’s SQD-Mini LED technology layers a densely packed Mini LED backlight with quantum dot enhancement to push both brightness and colour accuracy significantly higher. It’s one of the key reasons Samsung’s high-end QLED sets can compete with OLED on HDR performance.
In roughly which year did plasma televisions first become available to consumers as large-screen flat-panel displays?
Correct! The first consumer plasma televisions appeared around 1997, pioneered largely by Fujitsu and Panasonic. They were eye-wateringly expensive at launch but represented the first realistic large-screen flat-panel option for home viewers.
Not quite — plasma TVs first reached consumers around 1997. Fujitsu and Panasonic were among the earliest brands to bring plasma panels to market, and while the screens were stunning for the time, prices were astronomical. Plasma technology remained popular until the rise of LCD and OLED eventually made it obsolete by the early 2010s.
What is the primary function of ‘local dimming’ in an LED-backlit LCD television?
Correct! Local dimming divides the LED backlight into zones that can be brightened or dimmed independently. This means dark areas of the image can be lit less intensely, dramatically improving contrast and black levels compared to a uniform backlight — especially useful during HDR content.
Not quite — local dimming allows specific zones of the backlight to dim or brighten independently of each other. Rather than lighting the whole screen uniformly, it targets darker regions of an image with less light, which noticeably improves contrast ratios. The more dimming zones a TV has, the more precise and convincing the effect.
Which Japanese company is widely credited with pioneering the first mass-market LCD television panels for home use during the late 1980s and 1990s?
Correct! Sharp was a trailblazer in LCD panel development and was the first to bring LCD televisions to a mass market. The company’s Aquos LCD TV line, launched in the early 2000s, became synonymous with the flat-panel revolution and helped make large LCD screens a mainstream household product.
Not quite — it was Sharp that led the way in mass-market LCD televisions. Sharp invested heavily in LCD research during the 1980s and eventually launched its iconic Aquos range, which brought flat-panel LCD TVs into millions of homes. The company’s Kameyama factory in Japan was once considered the world’s most advanced LCD manufacturing plant.
What does HDR stand for in the context of modern television display standards?
Correct! HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and it refers to a display’s ability to reproduce a wider range of brightness levels — from very deep blacks to extremely bright highlights — simultaneously. HDR content, paired with a capable display, delivers a far more lifelike and immersive picture than standard dynamic range.
Not quite — HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. It describes both a content format and a display capability, allowing screens to show a much broader spectrum of brightness from shadows to highlights at the same time. Formats like HDR10, Dolby Vision, and HLG each define how that extended brightness and colour data is encoded and displayed.
MicroLED is considered a next-generation display technology — but what makes it fundamentally different from OLED?
Correct! MicroLED uses microscopic inorganic LED pixels that each produce their own light, similar in concept to OLED but without the organic material that makes OLED susceptible to burn-in and degradation over time. MicroLED promises OLED-like contrast and response times with far greater longevity and potentially higher peak brightness.
Not quite — the key difference is that MicroLED uses inorganic LED pixels, which means it avoids the burn-in and lifespan concerns associated with the organic compounds in OLED panels. Both technologies are self-emissive, meaning each pixel generates its own light without a backlight, but MicroLED’s inorganic construction makes it significantly more durable over time.
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How to turn off energy-savings modes on your TV
The process varies by model
Fortunately, most smart TVs make it pretty easy to turn off their energy-saving settings.
The exact steps vary depending on your TV’s brand, but in most cases, you’ll find these settings in the picture settings menu. If your TV has a Power Saving picture mode enabled by default, simply switch to another picture mode, such as Standard, Sports, or Cinema, to get a brighter picture.
You can typically find additional energy-saving features under General settings. On LG TVs, for example, go to Settings > General > Energy Saving > Energy Saving Step to turn it off or adjust the level.
On Samsung TVs, go to Settings > General > Power and Energy Saving > Eco Solution to turn off the energy-saving features you don’t want.
On Roku TVs, go to Settings > System > Power > Power Saving to turn it off.
Finally, on Sony TVs and Hisense TVs running Google TV, go to Settings > System > Power & Energy > Energy Saver.
Once you’ve turned off your TV’s energy-saving features, you should notice an immediate boost in brightness, and the colors should pop more, too.
All things considered, it’s understandable why most TVs have these features enabled by default, but I think turning them off is the best way to get the most out of your TV’s picture quality. That said, if you’d rather have your TV conserve some energy, you don’t necessarily have to turn everything off. At the very least, I’d recommend switching away from a power-saving picture mode while keeping any automatic brightness settings enabled. That way, you can still get a brighter, better-looking picture without completely sacrificing energy savings.
- Brand
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LG
- Display Size
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42, 48, 55, 65, 77, or 83 inches
- Operating System
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webOS
- Display Type
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OLED
