There are a lot of ways to make your TV look better, but the easiest is to lower the backlight. This reduces eye fatigue in a dark room and it also extends the life of your LED screen. LEDs can last over ten years with this setting, so it’s worth making the switch.
The image on your TV isn’t just determined by the resolution — it also depends on how good or bad the upscaling is. A good upscaling engine will scale a lower-resolution video to fit the higher-resolution pixel count of your TV, preserving fine details and delivering a sharp, clear image. But a poor upscaling engine can produce muddy, blurry images that are hard to watch.
Motion modes or motion smoothing slicken up your video and help to hide artifacts from fast-moving scenes, but they also reduce the clarity of the image and increase input lag. If you have a gaming console connected to your TV, turning off motion smoothing can knock off a few dozen milliseconds of input lag. That may not sound like much, but it can be a big improvement when you’re trying to play games on your TV.
Many new TVs have a motion or blur reduction feature. It might have a variety of names like frame or motion interpolation, motion estimation or even judder reduction. Whatever it’s called, it does the same thing: analyzes adjacent video frames and guesses what they would look like if they hadn’t been skipped. While this can sometimes eliminate judder, it often makes the image look fake and smeared, and most sets with 120Hz refresh rates allow you to disable it along with motion blur reduction.
Another easy way to improve your TV is to turn off noise reduction settings. These features usually have a variety of names as well (like noise suppression, Mosquito or MPEG NR). Regardless of the name, they almost always introduce some level of input lag. This can be a problem when gaming, as it makes it harder to control your game.
Lastly, try to watch a mix of different content on your TV. This will help avoid image retention, which occurs when static elements like logos or menu bars on the screen become permanently fixed to the picture. If you use your TV to play video games or to watch a lot of cable news and sports, these kinds of static elements can cause image retention that can last for minutes or hours after the TV is turned off.
There are plenty of products that can help you keep your TV looking neater, such as self-adhesive antireflective coatings that you can apply to the screen. However, these aren’t a substitute for simply mounting your TV away from any sources of reflection and lowering the backlight to its lowest level. Moreover, they may not remove all reflections and can be difficult to remove once applied. A better option is to install a motorized lift system, such as the TY-05-40 that can be set up to lower your TV and then raise it out of sight when not in use. lowering TV’s