You’ve just made it home with your brand new Samsung S90F, ready to enjoy its deep blacks, accurate color and excellent brightness. The TV has been carefully unboxed, set up in your living room, plugged in and started up. After going through the setup process, you start your favorite streaming service, or put on your beloved Blu-ray, but something is off. Everything looks a little blue, and it isn’t as bright as you were hoping.
There’s an issue that plagues every TV you buy: The default settings deliver far from an accurate picture and usually hamstring the performance of the display. Sure, you could spend a few hundred dollars to get a calibration from a certified TV calibrator, but that’s not always feasible or cost effective with a midrange TV.
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Fortunately, with today’s TVs it’s pretty easy to get a great picture with just a few changes to the settings. And it should take you only a minute or two to get the most out of your Samsung TV without any extra cost. The following steps will work with older Samsung TVs, too, although not all of the features will be available or relevant. You could also find out which settings to adjust on other brands, too.
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Turn off the TV’s Eco settings
Samsung TVs, like many TVs now, ship with a collection of energy saving options turned on. While we applaud the efforts to make TVs more energy efficient, these settings almost always negatively affect the picture and only offer a marginal amount of cost savings.
The first thing we recommend doing is turning these off by, for example, going to the Power and Energy Saving menu under General & Privacy. The two settings to make sure that are off are Energy Saving Solution and Brightness Optimization, but also ensure that all of the options in the Power and Energy Saving menu, apart from Auto Power Off, are turned off. This last setting will turn the TV off after a period of inactivity and it’s best to keep it employed.
Having these options off will guarantee that the TV will be capable of reaching its maximum brightness, and make sure that your ambient light conditions won’t automatically adjust the brightness or color temperature of the image.
Change that picture setting
Now that the global energy saving measures are turned off, you can make the most significant change to the TVs picture by changing the picture mode. You’ll need to have content playing in order to set your picture mode properly, and you’ll need to check it for both SDR and HDR content. While adjusting the settings, we recommend having All Sources selected under Apply Picture Settings in the Expert Settings menu.
Back in the days when TVs struggled to get a few hundred nits of brightness, they would usually default to Dynamic or Vivid mode after setup. The picture was bright (comparatively), but it was also very blue. As technology has evolved to allow TVs to reach some pretty-staggering brightness levels, there’s no need for TV companies to force high brightness in Dynamic mode. Instead, TVs now ship in the most energy efficient mode — Samsung calls it Eco.
The fastest way to get the best picture from your TV, is to switch it into Filmmaker Mode, which came into existence five years ago and was designed to allow a TV to deliver the most accurate picture for SDR and HDR content. In addition, Filmmaker mode disables extra processing features like motion smoothing.
If you want to have different modes for different viewing conditions — for instance, one for daytime viewing with the curtains open and one for after the sun goes down — you can also use Movie, but it will involve changing some of the settings we suggest later. For gaming modes, like Game, you’ll also want to change the Color Tone to Warm2 (the accurate default setting in Filmmaker and Movie). It’s important to note that the Brightness Optimization setting discussed above will need to be turned off for each picture mode that you adjust.
Just changing the Picture Mode to Filmmaker is a big step forward in improving your TVs performance. But there are still a few more options that should be checked and adjusted if necessary.
Turn off any motion enhancement
If you’re using Filmmaker mode for SDR and HDR, then you shouldn’t need to change any clarity settings (although it’s still worth checking). For Movie picture mode, though, you’ll want to go to Expert Settings, scroll down to Picture Clarity Settings and make sure it’s toggled off.
While our recommendation is to always keep Picture Clarity off, there might be situations where you want smoother motion, such as with fast-moving sports. Once on, you can individually adjust Blur Reduction and Judder Reduction to your taste, as well as try out Clear Motion and Noise Reduction. If you do have it on, keep the values on the low side so extra artifacts aren’t introduced into the picture.
Make sure you’re able to get maximum brightness capability
Depending on the model and year of your Samsung TV, there might be a Peak Brightness setting in the Expert Settings menu. To allow for the TV’s highest potential brightness, make sure this is set to High instead of Medium (you’ll see the overall TV picture get brighter when you toggle this). With an SDR signal, this might be too bright if you’re watching in a dark room, so you can dial back the Brightness slider to bring it to a more comfortable level for your eyes (it’s suggested to leave the Brightness slider at 50 with HDR signals).
These are some quick and easy basic settings you can adjust to make sure you’re getting the most out of your new (or old) Samsung TV. But there’s still more you can do to further fine tune your TV’s picture. If you want to splurge on a full calibration from a certified professional, an ISF calibrator will ensure your TV is performing to its highest capabilities. Instead, you could learn about the basic settings on your TV, purchase a calibration disc — such as the Spears & Munsil UHD Benchmark disc — and make some adjustments yourself.
