The settings you should change immediately after buying a new TV
It's finally a good time to make the jump to a 4K TV. Prices have come down, HDR is up to snuff, and there are a bevy of great models to choose from. But once you bring your new TV home, you may want to take a trip through its settings and tweak a few in order to get the best possible picture.
If you peek into your TV's settings, you'll see a lot of features with catchy names — like "Ultra Black" or "Live Color." Many of these features, however, are marketing gimmicks designed to sound impressive, one-up the competition's spec sheets, and make the picture pop next to other TVs in brightly lit showrooms. In fact, many of them actually remove detail from the picture or cause distortions and artifacts that degrade picture quality. Here are the settings you'll want to turn off for the best possible image.
Jump into your TV's settings and head to the picture settings menu. Before you start tweaking, set the display's mode to "Movie" (this is sometimes called "Cinema," "Expert" or "Custom"). This will ensure that your basic brightness, contrast and color settings are as close to accurate as possible — at least, without going through a time-consuming calibration.
