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Category: TV settings

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Get the best picture from your Hisense TV: Change these settings

We’ve said it a lot: Hisense TVs (and especially the U7 line) offer some of the best bang for your buck. They are beautiful right out of the box. But they can be even better — more bright, more color-rich — with just a few tweaks to the TV’s picture settings.

As we’ve heard from manufacturers, most people don’t do anything to their TV after setting it up. It gets turned on and watched as-is. The picture will be great, sure, but by adjusting a few settings, it can be brilliant.

Turn off these default settings

The first order of business: Turn off a few settings.

You may have already tried to disable the Eco mode, but couldn’t find it in the Power settings. That’s because it’s not there. On a Hisense TV, it’s called Energy Saving.

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To turn it off, start at the Home Screen. Press the Settings button on your remote, then navigate to Picture, then General, and then Picture Mode. Make sure that Energy Saving is not selected.

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While in the Settings area, select your preferred Picture Mode. Of the options available, we recommend Theater Day, Theater Night, or Filmmaker Mode. The primary difference between the two theater modes is brightness, which can always be further adjusted.

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Here’s another default setting to turn off: Intelligent Scene. This setting allows the TV to make adjustments based on the content on the screen. Go back to the General menu, navigate down to Intelligent Scene, and toggle it Off.

While in this menu, turn off Automatic Light Sensor. When enabled, this setting tends to do the job a little too well, and can significantly darken the screen based on the light in the room.

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There’s one last default setting to switch off in this menu: Content Type Auto Detection. This automatically switches your TV into Filmmaker or IMAX Mode if it’s tagged as such in the content — like a movie or show on a streaming service. When Content Type Auto Detection is turned off, your TV will use the Picture Mode that you’ve set, instead of allowing the content to determine the mode.

Bigger, bolder brightness

You can also fine tune your Hisense TV’s brightness. You’ll likely be watching SDR (standard dynamic range) and HDR (high dynamic range) content so you’ll want to set the brightness for both ranges.

To set the brightness for SDR content, start on the Home Screen. Press the Settings button on your remote, navigate to Picture, and then Brightness. Here you can set the brightness to your liking. These settings will apply to all SDR content.

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To set the brightness for HDR, start by playing some content — a show or movie — from a streaming service with HDR programming or a YouTube video (one of our favorites: Eugene Belsky’s channel). With the HDR content playing or paused, there are a few things to do. First, you may notice the picture is a little dark. The HDR picture mode is set to HDR Energy Saving by default. To make changes, press the Settings button, then Picture, then General, and then Picture Mode. Here you can change the Picture Mode to HDR Theater, Filmmaker Mode, or whatever your preference might be.

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There are a few more settings tweaks that make your TV even brighter and punchier, which is especially nice for HDR content. Back in the Brightness menu, select Local Dimming. This setting controls the backlight brightness to get better overall contrast levels. Another way to think of it: It makes the brightest areas of your TV even brighter.

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If you want the absolute best picture in HDR, set the Local Dimming to High and turn the brightness up to 100 — as long as it’s not too much for your eyes to handle.

Smoother viewing, device connection

With motion smoothing, it really comes down to personal preference. You might notice it, and you might not. If you do notice it, it’s hard to unsee.

Here’s how to make adjustments. In the Picture menu, navigate down to Clarity, and then to Motion Enhancement. You can turn it off altogether or choose from several presets, including the Custom setting, which allows you to adjust Judder Reduction and Blur Reduction. Play around with different options to see what you like.

There are also a few settings that can make using your Hisense TV even easier.

If you have additional devices like a soundbar, Blu-ray player, or gaming system, you might want to control everything with one remote. To set that up, press the Settings button, then go to All Settings (cogwheel in the top corner of the screen), then to Channels & Inputs, and then Inputs. Here, make sure that HDMI Control is toggled On. There are additional options that allow you to automatically power your TV and compatible devices on and off together.

Set the HDMI formats based on which devices are in which inputs. Under the Inputs menu, go to HDMI Format and make your choices accordingly. For gaming consoles that output high frame rates or 4K Blu-ray players, you’ll want to set the input to Enhanced Format.

These settings changes to picture quality will help set up your TV to deliver the best viewing experience, customized to your preferences. If you want to make additional or more detailed changes, you’ll now have a better understanding of where some of these options live and what it means to adjust them.

Have a different brand of TV and want to make similar adjustments? Most modern TVs have similar features to Hisense, however, they might be labelled differently, and it can get confusing. If you’re looking for LG, Samsung, Sony, TCL, or Panasonic, we have instructions for those, too.

April 1, 2025
How to set up your TV for watching NCAA March Madness basketball
So you’ve grabbed yourself a brand new TV (be it a sweet OLED, QLED or the best-of-both QD-OLED) in preparation for March Madness, but you want to make sure it’s all set and ready for some hot hoops action.

Whether you’re screaming at the top of your lungs for Duke, UNC, Kansas, Kentucky, UConn, South Carolina, or any of the dozens of other schools battling it out on the hardwood — men’s or women’s — NCAA basketball is one of the most watched sporting events in the world (and the 2024 women’s championship game was the most-watched women’s college basketball game ever!).

But first, a few March Madness 2025 essentials:
If you’re watching the madness unfold on your TV, it probably isn’t optimized for sports if most of your watching is of the movie or TV show variety. But don’t sweat it, a few quick tweaks can transform your viewing experience, making every buzzer-beater look its best. To that end, we have a few must-have tweaks to get you there.

Choose the best picture mode

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Most TVs have presets you can choose out of the box, with names like Vivid, Cinema, Movie, and, of course, Sports. Our first note of advice is to avoid the Sports mode, which we find puts too much emphasis on increasing brightness, contrast, and color saturation, often resulting in a blown-out image — especially those brilliant school colors! Vivid and Dynamic modes are just as guilty.

Instead, we suggest using your TV’s Cinema, Movie, or Natural picture modes as they tend to offer the most natural-looking picture that will be great for your NCAA action. If your TV has a Filmmaker mode, give that a whirl, too.

Brightness and black levels

You want to be able to see everything, even when the picture is ultra bright or dark and shadowy. To set your TV up to deliver the best of both ends of the spectrum, we recommend using a scene from a movie or show that is really dark, like a scene from a Batman movie or a horror film, and hit pause.

Now, access your TV’s brightness settings and increase it until you can see everything lurking in the shadows — expose that Caped Crusader or serial killer hiding in the closet. Then, slowly bring the brightness back down until the blacks are rich dark, while maintaining those subtle details. The moment they start to disappear, stop. You’ve nailed it. It’s a balance, and you may have your own preferences, but that’d what this is all about — dialling it in for you.

Contrast

Also known as white levels, contrast is what controls the difference between the darks and brights. And similar to what you did with the brightness, scan your favorite movies and shows, and find a scene with lots of white — the bright arena lights, a player’s white jersey, even the ref’s crisp white shirt — and pause it.

Lower the contrast until you can see the details clearly — the glare off the court, the texture of the jerseys, the wrinkles on the ref’s face. Then, increase it as high as you can without losing those details. If they disappear, back it off a bit and that’s your sweet spot.

Tint and saturation

Most TVs have a pretty good balance of tint and color saturation, so first have a look at yours and you might just find that they’re OK as they are for watching basketball. In our experience, though, it’s well worth playing around a little, and hey, if you get too deep and you don’t like it, just reset it to the default — no travelling, no foul.

If you are going to play around, find a close-up of a player’s face, pause it, and adjust the tint until the skin tones look natural. Whether it’s a men’s or women’s game, the principle is the same. Do the same with saturation — you’re looking for natural-looking skin tones.

Image modes are a nuisance

Finally, ditch those extra image modes. Motion smoothing, noise reduction, image enhancement … they all sound good, but they’re usually terrible. Blurry details, weird artifacts, the dreaded soap opera effect (aka motion smoothing) — they’ll ruin your picture. Just turn them all off.

And what about sound?

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Let’s be honest, your TV speakers aren’t exactly courtside seats and you should probably just not use them unless you have to. A soundbar is a fantastic upgrade, and if you already have a proper audio setup with an AV receiver and a great pair of speakers, we suggest play around with the presets.

For example, maybe the “sports” mode on your receiver is actually good for sports, and most modern AV receivers have a long list of additional presets like Movie, Concert, and more that might surprise you. What you’re looking for in the end is clarity: you don’t just want to hear the roar of the crowd drowning out the commentators or the players on the court. But the only way to dial this in to what you prefer is trial and error. The next time you put a game on (and it doesn’t specifically have to be basketball — any sport with a crowd will do), flip through the audio modes and find what works. Maybe throw on a rerun of last year’s thrilling NCAA women’s final to really put your setup to the test with a loud crowd.
March 19, 2025
Get the best picture from your Panasonic TV: Change these settings

If you’ve seen Digital Trends TV reviews, you know that all of the TVs we get our hands on can produce a beautiful image. However, even the best of the best TVs don’t necessarily come out of the box that way. Before evaluation or collecting video footage, we make a few important changes to the settings to ensure that each TV produces its best possible picture. That goes for every TV brand across the board, including Panasonic.

Panasonic is back in the US market in a major way, and we’re really excited. However, its return doesn’t mean it’s a plug-and-play situation. If you want to take full advantage of what Panasonic has to offer — especially if you have the stunning Z95A OLED — the tweaks we’re about to suggest will make it beyond gorgeous.

Here are a few simple changes you can make to your Panasonic TV to make it really shine.

Turn off these default settings now

The TV’s optical sensor detects the brightness of your room and how warm or cold that light may be. When this setting is turned on, the TV adjusts the picture automatically, attempting to optimize brightness and color temperature accordingly. However, instead of letting the TV be the decision maker, you can control these settings yourself — and to better effect.

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Turning off the optical sensor within Panasonic’s interface is simple. Press the Settings button on your remote. Navigate down to Picture, and then go to Ambient Sensor. Make sure Auto Brightness and Auto White Balance are both Off.

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With these critical settings now under your control, choose a picture mode. Press the Settings button, then head to Picture, and select Picture Mode. Of the several options available, our favorites are Filmmaker or True Cinema: Both are a little warmer and more natural, and generally good to go. Cinema is a little bit cooler and brighter than these two. If you want something even cooler — more blue is another way to think of it — try Normal. Avoid Sport or Dynamic, which tend to juice up the picture too much and make things feel blown-out and unnatural.

Better brightness, lush luminance

There are a few ways to fine tune the brightness of your Panasonic TV. Some folks like a brighter setting for watching during the day, while some who watch at night prefer less brightness. On your Panasonic TV you can set different brightness levels to different Picture Modes. That way, one can be your daytime picture mode with full brightness, and the other can be a little darker for nighttime viewing.

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Recognize that sometimes you’ll be watching SDR (standard dynamic range) content, while other times, you may be watching in HDR (high dynamic range), so you’ll want to set your preferences for both.

To set the brightness for SDR content: From the home screen, press the Settings button on your remote, go to Picture, and then Brightness. Here you can use the slider to adjust the Luminance Level to set the brightness of your choosing.

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For HDR, you’ll want to test out some HDR content. This could be a show on a streaming service that has HDR programming. The easiest source is a YouTube video, such as Eugene Belsky’s HDR work (we’re big fans). While playing HDR content, follow the same steps for changing SDR settings: Go to Picture, then Brightness, and then Luminance Level. For HDR, we like Luminance maxed out to 100.

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There’s one more thing you can do to make your Panasonic TV even brighter. While still in the Brightness menu, head down to Advanced Settings and select Peak Luminance. This setting increases the overall brightness, allowing the TV to make the brightest areas of the image even brighter.

You’ll notice significant differences between Low, Mid, and High. To elevate the contrast and make bright objects really shine in HDR, we recommend High Peak Luminance paired with maxed-out brightness.

Super smooth movement

Motion smoothing really comes down to personal preference: Some people like it, some think it makes everything look fake (the soap opera effect), and some don’t even notice it. If you’re not a fan, it’s hard to unsee it, and you’ll want to make adjustments.

Here’s how to make tweaks on your Panasonic TV. Start with Settings, then go to Picture, and navigate down to Motion. You’ll want to experiment with Intelligent Frame Creation, which can be set to Min, Mid, Max, or Custom, or it can be turned Off entirely.

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In Custom, you can use sliders to adjust Blur Reduction and Film Smoothing from 0 to 10. At the bottom there’s a Clear Motion setting that reduces motion blur in fast moving scenes. This can make content displayed at 24 frames per second look a bit jarring. For movies and shows, which are typically 24 fps, consider setting Clear Motion to Off. For content with higher frame rates, like live sports, you may want to turn it On.

Effortless connectivity and control

There are a couple of settings that can make using your TV and any external devices easier.

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If you’re adding devices like a soundbar or Blu-ray player or gaming system, it’s usually most convenient to control everything with one remote. Here’s how to set that up. On the home screen, navigate all the way to the right to the Settings cogwheel; this brings up all of the available settings. Navigate to Display & Sounds, then down to HDMI-CEC Device Control. If you want to control all devices through your TV, set all of the available settings to On. ARC/eARC allows the TV to send sound to your soundbar or receiver. Power Control will turn your soundbar on at the same time as your TV. Remote Control Pass Through will allow your TV remote to control things like your soundbar volume or navigate through the basic menu on your gaming system.

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Here’s one last tweak, which perhaps should have been first on the list. Panasonic TVs use Amazon’s Fire TV platform. If you don’t want video and sound to play automatically on the home screen, you can disable it. Start with the All Settings menu, then head down to Preferences and select Featured Content. Turn both Allow Video Autoplay and Allow Audio Autoplay to Off.

The main takeaway: Most modern TVs, especially those in the upper tiers of each brand, look really good. But with a few quick adjustments the picture can be transformed to look utterly spectacular.

Have a different brand of TV and want to make similar adjustments? Most modern TVs have similar features to Panasonic, however, they might be labelled differently, and it can get confusing. If you’re looking for LG, Samsung, Sony, Hisense, or TCL, we have instructions for those, too.

March 17, 2025
Get the best picture from your TCL TV: Change these settings

The numbers from TV brands tell us that most people don’t change many, if any, TV settings to get the best or ideal image quality. It’s a real shame, especially when dropping big bucks on a TV, and especially if your set is a 115-inch monster like the TCL QM891G.

For big TV energy — 85 inches and up — it’s the little things that can make a significant difference because everything is magnified on a screen of this size. Let’s take a look at what settings can be adjusted to achieve maximum viewing joy from your TCL TV.

Turn off these automatic settings

The first thing to change: Turn off the TV’s Eco mode (in the TCL QM891G, which runs Google TV, it’s called Energy Saving). The TV may have prompted you to do this during setup, but if not, here’s how.

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From the Home Screen, press the Settings button on your remote. Select All Settings, navigate down to System, then to Power and Energy, and then Energy Saver, and make sure it’s turned Off. This ensures you have complete control over TV brightness. If Energy Saver is turned on, you’ll notice in the bottom right corner that brightness can’t be pushed past 60. Even worse, Adaptive Brightness will be turned on, allowing the TV to change brightness in order to save energy. That would probably make for a less-than-ideal viewing experience.

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Make sure that Adaptive Brightness is turned Off. From the All Settings menu, head down to Display and Sound, then to Intelligent Settings, and then Intelligent Picture. You’ll see Adaptive Brightness, Adaptive Content, and Adaptive Color Temperature — turn them all Off. Otherwise, the TV will make automatic adjustments not just to brightness, but also color temperature based on the room’s ambient light and content on the screen.

Get the best brightness, the warmth you want

With these automatic settings turned off, select a Picture Mode. From the home screen, press the Settings button, then go down to Picture, then Picture Mode. There are five Picture Mode options available — we recommend Movie for its warmer and more natural tones. Sports Mode tends to juice up things too much and make colors look unnatural. Smart HDR is a little better, but still a bit oversaturated. It’s an obvious “no” to Low Power, and Vivid falls into the same category as Sports, delivering an image that is too harsh.

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Next, set the brightness you want from your TV. If you’re watching during the day in a room with a lot of ambient light, you might prefer higher brightness. If it’s a darker room or you’re watching at night, you might want to turn the brightness down. Big TVs can produce a lot of light, and sometimes it’s just too much.

You’ll also want to change the settings for SDR (standard dynamic range) and HDR (high dynamic range). From the home screen, set the brightness for SDR content: Press the Settings button on your remote, go to Picture, and then choose Brightness. From there, make the adjustments to your liking.

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To adjust HDR brightness settings, you’ll want to play with some HDR content, such as a show on a streaming service. (YouTube is an easy source — Jennifer Gala’s channel is a great option for HDR content.) A format indicator, such as HDR10, in the top corner will show that you’re viewing HDR content so you know you’re adjusting brightness for HDR.

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There’s one more option to further fine tune your TCL TV’s brightness. From the Picture menu, choose Advanced Settings. Then select Brightness Settings and head down to Local Contrast, which adjusts backlight and contrast on different areas of the screen to optimize picture performance. When toggling between Off, Low, and High, you’ll see significant differences: Off results in a much flatter image, Low provides a little brightness and punch back, and High delivers much more brightness across the board and more contrast between brighter and darker areas. To get the most out of the TV’s HDR performance, set the Local Contrast to High and turn the brightness up to 100, if your eyes can handle it.

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Smoother viewing, more control

You can also adjust motion smoothing. This really comes down to personal preference and whether or not you even notice the jarring effect that can result from different frame rates.

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To customize motion smoothing on a TCL TV, start with Picture Settings, head down to Advanced Settings, and then select Motion. You can have Motion Clarity turned off altogether if you like. If you turn it on, use the pair of sliders to set your preferences for Blur Reduction and Judder Reduction. Play around to find what you like best for different types of content. You may prefer movies and shows filmed at 24 frames per second (fps) to look one way and higher frame rate content like live programming, reality TV, and sports to look another.

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There are also some settings that can make connecting your TV with external devices like a soundbar, Blu-ray player, or gaming system easier and more convenient. To set that up, go to the All Settings menu, then to Channels and Inputs, then External Inputs, and then External Devices Control (CEC). Make sure HDMI Control is turned on. This allows you to control things like soundbar or receiver volume, Blu-ray player menus, or even game console menus with one remote.

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There are also a couple of “in sync options” that allow devices to power on or rest in standby in sync (synchronously) with each other. You can fine tune those settings, too.

These settings changes to picture quality will help set up your TV viewing for success. If you want to make additional or more detailed changes, you’ll now have a better understanding of where some of these options live and what it means to change them.

Have a different brand of TV and want to make similar adjustments? Most modern TVs have similar features to TCL, however, they might be labelled differently, and it can get confusing. If you’re looking for LG, Samsung, Sony, Hisense, or Panasonic, we have instructions for those, too.

March 14, 2025