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How to adjust your TV picture settings, no professional, disc or Apple TV 4K required - CNET

Posted: 09 May 2021 03:30 AM PDT

001-samsung-q80t-qled-tv-ovr — Accurate green, brown and gray can help make a TV's picture look more natural.
David Katzmaier/CNET

Yes, some people get their TVs professionally calibrated and some buy a setup disc like the Spears & Munsil UHD HDR or HD Benchmark Blu-rays, which have test patterns and instructions on how to adjust your screen. There's even a new Apple TV feature that uses an iPhone to adjust color automatically. All of those methods work. You can get your picture quality looking better just using your eyes and the options available in your TV's settings menu. And it's completely free.

TV picture settings can seem intimidating at first, but a few easy tweaks are worth it, whether you're watching the latest streaming TV show, enjoying 4K HDR movies or playing video games. Colors can look more lifelike and accurate, brightness can be comfortable for viewing in daytime and at night, and motion can look more natural. Changing your picture mode is the first step, it takes just a few seconds and in our tests it actually works better than the Apple TV color balance in many cases.

A word of warning before we begin: Picture setting names are all over the place. A setting one TV-maker calls "brightness" could control something totally different on another set, for example. We tackle a lot of the variations below, but we can't account for every TV-maker, especially on older models, so your mileage may vary.

Start with the right picture mode

08-picture-screen — The easiest way to get accurate color? Put your TV in Movie or Cinema mode.
Sarah Tew/CNET

Your TV's picture mode has the largest effect on overall picture quality. This one setting controls multiple other settings to change the overall "look" of your TV. If you've never changed this setting it's probably still the default mode, typically labeled Standard, Vivid, Dynamic, Bright or something similar. The TV is its least accurate in this mode, with typically blown-out colors and image "enhancing" features that might catch the eye on a shelf in a store, but at home might make the TV look worse than it could.

A place to start is switching to the mode called Cinema, Movie, Calibrated or Filmmaker. These will dial back some of the picture's more garish aspects. At first, the TV might even look soft or too warm ("reddish"). We'll discuss below why that is, but for now trust that you're actually seeing more fine detail, and the image is more lifelike.

Read more: What's the best picture mode?

Let's move on to some specific controls.

Backlight, OLED light

Controls the light intensity of the entire display
Too high and it can cause headaches or eye strain, waste energy and, in some cases, cause premature wear on the TV
Too low and the image is too dim and difficult to see

Nearly all TVs will have some control that adjusts the overall light output of the TV. It's labeled as the backlight control, or OLED light, or something similar. On newer Sony TVs this setting is labeled Brightness, and on Roku TVs there are five settings (Brightest to Darkest) in addition to a backlight control. Whatever the label, this setting is the actual brightness, which is generally separate from the control labeled "Brightness" (see below).

You should adjust this setting based on room lighting and personal preference. Brighter rooms and daylight viewing will call for a higher setting, while home theater or nighttime viewing often looks better at a lower setting. On an LCD TV, a bright backlight can wash out the image somewhat and reduce contrast and pop, especially on models that lack full array local dimming.

The brighter the TV is, the more energy it will consume, if you're concerned about how much electricity you use. Higher brightness also makes OLED TVs somewhat more susceptible to image retention and burn-in -- although that's unlikely with typical viewing habits, even at maximum brightness.

Contrast

On the left, what the image of some friendly beachside 'roos should look like. On the right, when the contrast control is set too high. Notice the lack of detail in the sand and how the clouds are blown out.

Geoffrey Morrison/CNET

Controls the white or bright parts of an image
Too high will erase detail from clouds, snow and other bright objects
Too low will look dim and flat

The contrast control adjusts how bright the bright parts of the image are. There is an upper limit, however. If you set the control too high, it "clips" the whites, making near-white details totally white. This effectively erases any detail in bright objects like clouds without making the image actually brighter.

To set contrast by eye, you'll need something with a lot of bright areas of the image. Baseball works pretty well for this -- a fly ball, pop fly, home runs, something with shots of the sky -- or skiing (depending on season, clearly) or something with clouds. What you're looking for is a bright image, but still with highlight detail. In other words, the bright areas of the image still have detail, and aren't just awash in white.

Once you've found something you think will work, turn the contrast control up until you start losing detail. Clouds will cease being clouds, snow will just be glare. Now turn the control back down till you see detail again. Somewhere in this range will be ideal. Since all content is a little different you might need to tweak it a bit as you watch other shows/movies.

Don't want to mess with all that? Just leave it at the default for the Movie or Cinema setting.

Brightness

On the left, what the teahouse should look like. On the right, when the brightness control is set too low. Notice how the shadows disappear completely.

Geoffrey Morrison/CNET

Controls the black or dark parts of an image
Too high will look flat and washed out
Too low will erase detail in shadows and dark areas of the image

On most TVs, the brightness control doesn't actually control the TV's "brightness." Instead, it adjusts how dark the darkest parts of the image are. Like contrast, there's a fine line between too high and too low. In this case, too high and the image will appear washed out. Too low and all shadows will disappear into black. (On newer Sony TVs, this control is labeled Black Level.)

brightness-closeup — A closeup from the image above. Notice how you can't see anything in the shadows in the image on the right.
Geoffrey Morrison/CNET

To set brightness, you're looking for the opposite type of content from contrast. Dark movies, like Aliens or The Dark Knight, are perfect for this. Some famously dark TV episodes might be too dark to use for this.

Turn the Brightness control down until everything disappears into blackness (or something close). From there, turn it back up so you can see detail in everything, but the image doesn't look washed out. Another test for this is a darker scene with someone with long hair. The underside of their hair (I don't know what people with hair call it) away from the light can be a good place to spot shadow detail -- also dark coats at night. Again, you might need to try a few different shows or movies to get it right.

Sharpness

On the left, the original image of the walls of Tallinn. On the right, what it could look like if you set the sharpness control too high.

Geoffrey Morrison/CNET

Controls artificial edge enhancement, not image sharpness
Too high erases image detail, adds a halo to fine lines
Depending on the TV, set to 0 there's no effect, or a slight softening

Believe it or not, the sharpness control doesn't really improve sharpness. In a way it improves apparent sharpness, but at the expense of actual fine detail and usually with additional noise. On nearly all TVs the sharpness control adds "edge enhancement," artificially accentuating any edges the TV finds in the image. The problem is, doing this hides the actual detail in the image, so the result looks more artificial with less actual detail.

sharpness-closeup-2 — A close-up of the example above. Note the extra noise and artificial "halo" around the spires on the right.
Geoffrey Morrison/CNET

So it may seem counterintuitive, but you should turn the sharpness control down, way down. Some TVs look best with the control at 0. Others look best within the first 10% or so of this control's range. If you're used to how your TV looks with the sharpness control way up, as it typically is in the Dynamic or Vivid modes, it might appear soft at first when you turn it down. Find some high-quality 4K content and you might be surprised how detailed it now looks. You should be able to find the sweet spot on your TV looking closely for textures in clothing, wrinkles in faces, hair and beards, that kind of thing.

Color and tint

Controls color saturation and red-green shift
A holdover from the analog TV days
Generally will be correct, or close enough, out of the box

Generally, the color and tint controls will be reasonably close to correct out of the box, especially in Cinema or Movie mode. You can experiment with their effects, but it's rare they're off by more than one or two steps in either direction.

At the top, the color temperature is set too low, or warm. At the bottom, it's set too high, or cool.
Geoffrey Morrison

Color temperature or white balance

Controls how warm or cool the image looks
Too high and the image will be too blue
Too low and the image will be too red

Color temperature is a difficult one. Your brain gets used to the color temp of your TV, so if you change it, it's going to seem "wrong." In fact, this is probably the first thing you'll notice if you switch to the Cinema or Movie mode. It's going to look too warm or "reddish." On most TVs, this is actually the most accurate and lifelike. Your TV has been lying to you for years!

Switch to your TV's warm color temperature mode and watch it for a few days. If it still seems off to you, try the standard mode. I promise the cool mode will look far too blue once you get used to warm.

Check out my article on color temp and why it matters for more info.

Motion interpolation or smoothing (the soap opera effect)

Soap opera effect smoothing tom cruise Vizio — David Katzmaier/CNET

Controls how "smooth" motion is by artificially creating new frames of video
Too high, or even enabled at all, it can be annoying to some
Too low and the TV might appear soft with motion, such as sports

As TV settings go, motion interpolation is a rather controversial topic. Many people, including film purists and pretty much everyone who works in Hollywood, hate it. It makes movies look like a cheap soap opera or a video you'd shoot on your phone. If you've ever looked at a new TV and just felt something was off, or the image just didn't look real, it's probably this. Some people like it, but a lot of people don't. Your new TV almost certainly has this feature turned on in non-Cinema or Movie modes. Turning it off might change how you feel about your purchase.

Game mode

Reduces input lag, or how long it takes for your input to register onscreen
Usually disables features that might make the image better
Useful for any game that requires timing or aiming, especially online multiplayer

Input lag is how long it takes for you to press a button on a game controller and then to have an onscreen effect in the game. For many people this delay, measured in milliseconds, isn't noticeable. For others, especially with certain types of games, it can make a massive difference. From jumping puzzles to pixel-perfect aim in a first-person shooter, getting the timing right in many games is crucial.

Minimizing input lag, usually via a feature called game mode, can make a significant difference. If you've bought a new TV and suddenly your scores and rankings have dropped, this might be why. It's not something you want to leave enabled all the time, since it usually disables processing features that can improve the TV's picture quality.

Some TVs and consoles now support switching to this mode automatically.

Further steps

As mentioned above, the next step to fine-tuning your TV to perfection is getting a setup disc. The Spears & Munsil disc is a great option because it gets you right to the patterns without any extraneous fluff. If you just want someone else to do it, ideally with specialized test equipment, see if there are any TV calibrators in your area.

Lastly, make sure any sources you have, like a streaming stick or a cable or satellite box, are set to your TV's resolution (4K for 4K TVs, etc). Generally speaking they should do this automatically, but it's worth digging into the settings to be sure. Your 4K TV won't look its best without 4K content. You might need to pay for a higher tier to get that, depending on the service.

Lastly, HDMI. Chances are whatever HDMI cables you have are fine. If you try to send 4K from a media streamer and it doesn't work, it's possible your HDMI cables can't handle the additional resolution. Fortunately, new HDMI cables are cheap. If your TV is getting the resolution you want from your sources, new HDMI cables won't make the image look or sound better, so you can save your money.

Now playing: Watch this: Calibrate your TV by eye

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As well as covering TV and other display tech, Geoff does photo tours of cool museums and locations around the world, including nuclear submarines, massive aircraft carriers, medieval castles, airplane graveyards and more.

You can follow his exploits on Instagram and YouTube, and on his travel blog, BaldNomad. He also wrote a bestselling sci-fi novel about city-size submarines, along with a sequel.

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Apple Shortcuts is great, but it needs a notification toggle - The Verge

Posted: 09 May 2021 06:00 AM PDT

Apple's Shortcuts app is a fantastic piece of iOS, a nearly limitless corner of the operating system that lets users automate almost anything they can think of, limited only by imagination and ability to use Apple's coding system (Federico Viticci's comprehensive collection on MacStories is a great place to start.) But Shortcuts has an issue so awful it renders it one of the most annoying parts of my phone, instead of one of the most useful: Apple insists on always showing notifications when I do something, and it's virtually impossible to turn it off.

Yes, I am aware that there is an extremely janky hack for disabling notifications on Shortcuts on a global level. The trick, as detailed by HowToGeek, involves going to the Screen Time part of settings and toggling back and forth between weeks to trick the software into giving you access to the standard notifications menu for the Shortcuts app.

There are a few issues with this, including the fact that it's annoying to do, requires mucking around with what is almost certainly a glitch, and it's extremely difficult to reenable notifications if you do disable them (since you'll have to flip back to the last week you had notifications enabled in Screen Time to glitch back into the same menu). It's also a global setting: you're either all in on Shortcuts banners or completely disabling them.

Apple, I assume, mandates notifications because Shortcuts are extremely powerful tools for automating things on your iPhone, and it's easy to imagine unscrupulous use of them.

But the thing is, the power of Shortcuts is to automate things in the background that I don't want to have to deal with, whether that's automatically disabling rotation lock when I open or close an app, open an app with a custom icon, or change the wallpaper when the battery life is low. A big glaring notification every time I do something detracts from that idea. I want my phone to be quietly helpful, not shouting in my face every time it does what I asked it to.

My new favorite use of Shortcuts is the recently added ability in iOS 14.5 to automatically turn on and off rotation lock only when I'm in video playing apps like Apple TV Plus or YouTube. The Shortcut works amazingly, but it's marred by the fact that every time I open or close YouTube (or the other apps I have it configured in), I lose the top chunk of my screen to a notification alerting me that, yes, the phone is doing the exact thing I programmed it to do. (It's a long notification, too, often taking a few seconds before it goes away.)

All I'm asking for is some middle ground. Apple doesn't need to fully nuke notifications for Shortcuts. But the company could easily allow for specific automations to have the option to run silently in the background on a case-by-case basis — giving users the best of both worlds.

The ball's in your court, Apple. And WWDC (with the presumed reveal of iOS 15) is just a few weeks away. Fingers crossed.

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