A new television is usually set to catch the eye under bright shop lights: vivid colours, extra sharpness and smoothed motion. At home, in the evening, the same settings make films look artificial. The good news is that the most important corrections take a few minutes and no equipment at all.
Start from the right mode
Choose the picture mode meant for films: Filmmaker Mode where the television has it, otherwise a mode called Cinema, Movie or Calibrated. Filmmaker Mode was introduced by the UHD Alliance with film-makers and manufacturers, and it switches off motion smoothing, sharpening and noise reduction while keeping the film's colour, frame rate and shape.
Avoid Vivid, Dynamic and Standard for films. They are bright and blue to stand out in a shop, and they push colours beyond what was intended.
Turn off the inventions
Motion smoothing, sold under many names, invents frames between the real ones. It makes films look like daytime television, the so-called soap opera effect. Turn it off for films; some people like a little of it for sport.
Sharpening adds outlines around edges, and noise reduction smears fine detail and film grain. On a good source both make the picture worse. Set sharpness to the mode's default or zero, and noise reduction off for discs and good streams.
The most important corrections take a few minutes and no equipment at all.
HDR and the room's light
HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision and HLG are ways of describing a wider range of brightness and colour. The television switches to its HDR settings automatically when such a film starts, and those settings are kept separately from the ones for ordinary pictures, so check the mode again while an HDR film is playing.
Many sets offer a dark-room and a bright-room variant, such as Dolby Vision Dark and Bright, or a light sensor that adapts the picture. In the evening with the lights low, the dark-room version is closest to the intended look; in daylight, the bright version or the sensor helps.
Small checks with a test pattern
Brightness, in most menus, really sets the black level. Pause on a dark scene: shadows should hold detail without the black turning grey. Contrast sets the white level: bright clouds and shirts should keep their texture. A free test pattern from a calibration disc or app makes both quicker, but a familiar film scene works too.
Settings are often stored per input, so a games console, a streaming box and the built-in apps may each need the same changes. For games, use the game mode, which cuts the delay between the controller and the screen. Leave the colour temperature on the warm setting the film mode chooses: it may look yellowish at first, but it is the standard white.
