Last Sunday, I was enjoying nature documentary by Barack Obama and thinking that am I watching how the director produces the movie and start googling a bit. After that, I end up spending the rest of the evening about how the director perspective of TV manufacturer and other controversial topics around that. This blog post is the by-product of that study and I’ll list down tips of the ideal tuning and tweaks to get the best looking picture for your home cinematic experience.
Filmmaker Mode
It is supported by famous directors to get the closest production and intention made by the film directors. It removes features such as motion smoothing and image sharpening that introduced in modern TV after 2019. If you want some movies with filmmaker mode, you will start seeing grains that intentionally created by directors and it looks darker. However, color looks saturate and odd in some movie category like anime and cartoons. A youtube clip by STOP THE FOMO points out some interesting points about filmmaker mode and its downsides.
If your TV have this, experiment it to find out there is any improvement or not.My cheap Samsung 4K TV doesn’t have it and can’t try to share my personal experience on this.
Modes for different watching experience
The first point to consider before deciding how many settings to configure is the lighting in the room. For people who watch TV at bright room, it is important to set higher number of backlight and brightness to counteract room light. For dark room with minimal light, average backlight and brightness still gives an ideal viewing experience.
I set up 2 modes for watching movie and a natural one with slight brighter setting for daytime viewing. Set up scenes at Alexa to toggle the mode easily by saying keywords.
Settings to focus for picture quality
CNET have a through post of the tips on all settings and criteria to consider while setting it up. I’ll extract the most important settings by order to get the best looking picture for modern TV.
Base Modes
Select to Movie mode before tuning other settings. Movie mode offers ideal movie watching setup with good color and neutral color temp. However, that depends on TV manufacturer.
If you want a 2nd mode, use Standard mode and set brightness and backlight to higher for daytime watching experience if the room exposes to sunlight or artificial light.
Color temperature
Warm color gives natural looking picture of objects than cool color temp which makes everything bluish and pale.
Sharpness
Set to 0 because it only sharpens artificially which is not intended by film makers and it will remove grains from objects such as human faces and introduces noise.
Backlight
Depends on the room light, set suitable value that can balance white and black color. If the value is too high, white background will beam your eyes. If the setting is too low, you can’t see dark color on the screen clearly.
Contrast and Brightness
Adjust these 2 settings side by side with trial and error. The reason behind this is contrast controls how white the white colors looks and brightness controls how black the black color looks. Too much of these 2 settings will deviate the accuracy of the pictures and it displays whiter and darker than it supposes to. Use a movie or a video clip that you see with your eyes before such as sports event or places you’ve been to to calibrate these settings.
Color
Just leave it as default settings. I play around these settings and don’t see any good outcome.
Motion Smoothing
This can be called Motion Interpolation or Auto Motion Plus is introduced after picture quality is high to 4K resolution. It becomes a big controversial topic among film makers and film watchers. Many film makers who supposes FilmMaker mode hates this Soap Opera Effect and there are enthusiasts that finds that it have benefits to motion blur and judder in the movie for Hi-Res TV.
I am not saying that it needs to turn it off but at least lower the setting to eliminate false smoothing out the fast moving scenes that it is not intended by movie makers. If you totally hate it, just disable it completely.
This is all the important settings that you need to check on your expensive TV if you haven’t done yet. You will see an improvement in overall picture quality and movie watching experience.