A 4K TV should always look incredible, but if yours doesn’t, the issue may not be the panel or the content. More often than not, it’s the default settings that make your TV appear softer or blurry.
Modern smart TVs come packed with more picture settings than you ever care to explore. The unfortunate thing is, not all of them are designed to deliver the best possible image. Some are configured to make the TV eye-catching on a showroom floor, while others are meant to reduce energy consumption. All of this affects the picture quality in different ways, but the good news is that fixing it only takes a few minutes.
Disable motion smoothing
It hurts more than it helps
If there’s one default setting that ruins the movie-watching experience more than anything else, it’s motion smoothing. It goes by different names depending on the TV brand, like Motion Plus, TruMotion, MotionFlow, or Auto Motion.
Whatever it’s called, it usually comes pre-enabled on TVs. The reason behind this is simple. Most films you see in theaters are shot at 24 FPS. Meanwhile, modern TVs have a high refresh rate of 60 or even 120 FPS.
What motion smoothing does is create extra frames and insert them between real ones to make movement look smoother. Ideally, this should make the movies look even better, but that’s usually not the case. That’s because the TV has to guess how objects will move from one frame to the next, and it can’t do this with 100% accuracy.
Those small errors add up and end up causing the infamous “soap opera effect.” It’s one of those things that you either notice right away or not at all. But once you realize it’s there, it’s impossible to ignore.
As you can guess, the fix is simple. Go into the TV’s picture settings and turn off motion smoothing entirely. Look for Motion or Motion Clarity on TCL TVs, TruMotion on LG models, Auto Motion Plus on Samsung sets, and Action Smoothing on Roku models.
Tweak sharpness
It doesn’t work the way you think
This one might sound weird, but hear me out. If faces on your 4K TV look crunchy, and you notice strange halos around the edges of objects, that’s almost certainly caused by the default sharpness setting being too high.
When it comes to your TVs, more sharpness doesn’t mean more detail. Instead, increasing sharpness usually adds artificial edge enhancement. In other words, your TV creates fake outlines that replace parts of the original image.
Also, the modern 4K content already has more detail than your eyes can comfortably process from a distance. When the sharpness is set too high, your TV simply starts adding halos around edges and exaggerating noise. This ends up making the film grainy and, ironically, a bit blurry.
The tricky part, though, is that there’s no single sharpness setting that works for every TV. Since every model processes the image differently, you’ll need to experiment a bit. On some TVs, the correct sharpness level might be around 10, while on others, it might be zero.
A quick way to find out the correct sharpness level is to just switch between different picture presets like Movie, Sports, Cinema, and more. Check the sharpness level of the preset that looks best and adjust it from there.
Change These 4 Settings to Boost Your Smart TV Performance
If your smart TV feels sluggish, you don’t need to upgrade immediately.
Turn off eco mode
Why make your TV look dull?
The most power-hungry part of a TV is, of course, the display itself. So, if you want to enjoy your TV without increasing the power consumption beyond a certain point, you need Eco Mode. It comes pre-enabled because low energy consumption is better for the environment.
The problem lies in how Eco Mode actually works. It constantly adjusts your TV’s brightness and contrast based on picture content and sometimes even the lighting in the room. And that’s not ideal if you’re eyeing the best picture quality. The effects of Eco Mode are especially noticeable with HDR content. Eco Mode keeps pulling the brightness down, and those highlights never really pop.
For this reason, Eco Mode doesn’t make sense when you’ve spent a hefty sum on buying that 4K TV. Also, the difference in power saving is usually negligible if you only use the TV for an hour or two daily.
You won’t find the Eco Mode option on your TV’s picture settings menu. Instead, go to the General, Advanced, or System menu and look for an option labeled Eco Mode or Energy Dashboard.
Adjusting these three simple settings should make a world of difference to your TV’s picture quality. Of course, that’s not all. To make your TV look even better, you should also explore different picture modes, adjust HDR settings, and ensure you’re using the right HDMI cable.
