How to Fix the Most Annoying Features of Your New HDTV

Jim Merithew/WIRED

Face it, Sherlock: You were befuddled by that massive package under the tree, but it was obviously a TV. The box was huge, flat, had a big “FRAGILE” stamped on it, and there was a smaller package taped to it shaped like a remote. I mean come on now.

Now that the mystery is solved and out of the box, it’s time to set it up. It’s not much harder than just plugging in the set and turning it on, but there are a few extra steps on the way to holiday binge-watching bliss. Let’s get to it.

Make Sure It’s Not in “Showroom Mode”

You don’t need to get your set professionally calibrated to improve its picture quality. But right off the bat, there may be a setting enabled that will make the picture look noticeably awful while giving you a suntan in the process. When your TV is fresh out of the box, plugged in, and turned on, the first thing it might ask you to do is choose between “Home”/”Standard” or “Showroom”/”Demo” mode. Make sure to pick the “Home” option.

That “Showroom” or “Demo” mode is made to make your TV stand out from the crowd in the middle of an electronics store. It blasts the brightness and color saturation, making your TV look like a Times Square jumbotron. If the TV doesn’t give you the option to select a mode when you turn it on—and the picture looks obnoxiously bright by default—dive into the menus and perform a factory reset.

Skip the Soap-Opera Effect

Likewise, your new TV may have all of its fancy motion-handling features—enhancements that combat blur in action scenes—turned on by default. There’s nothing wrong with this when you’re watching sports, home movies, or actual soap operas. But movies? It makes them look uncinematic. You’re not seeing what the director intended.

There’s a deeper explanation of what’s happening with this “soap-opera effect” here, but you may just want an ASAP way to make things look the way you’re used to. The easy way to do it is to put your set in “Cinema,” “Movie,” “Film,” or “THX” mode. If you want to dive deeper into your set’s settings right off the bat, go into the menus and locate the motion-handling settings. Every TV manufacturer has a different name for them—“Clear Motion Rate,” “Motionflow,” “Trumotion,” “SPS,” “AquoMotion,” and so on.

Fill the Screen You Paid For

All right, you have your picture just perfect—or good enough to kick back and stop tinkering with, at least. But why isn’t what you’re watching actually filling the screen? Or maybe it fills the screen, but it looks stretched out and surprisingly low-def for a high-def TV.

Even though an HDTV is capable of showing sharper footage than a standard-definition TV, you also need an HD content source to get the most out of all those extra pixels. If you have a standard-definition cable box, sorry, but standard-definition broadcasts are all you’re gonna get (don’t worry; there’s a workaround in the next section). The TV will handle standard-def feeds in one of two ways: It’ll display it at its native resolution in 4:3 aspect ratio, right smack-dab in the middle of the screen. Or you can enable “Zoom,” “Full Screen,” or “Stretch” mode, where it stretches the 4:3 footage to 16:9, filling the entire screen in craptacular fashion. The best thing to do is to set the TV to “Auto-Adjust” in the picture settings; with that setting, the TV will display all content at its native resolution.

Do you have an HD cable box, but the picture you’re seeing is still curiously low-def? You’re probably not tuned to the HD version of the channel. Those are usually at the higher reaches of the channel guide, and you should be able to set your guide to only display HD channels.

HD Without an HD Box

Are you the last person in the world to upgrade from a standard-definition TV to a high-def set? Well then, congratulations on your patience and your new TV! Here’s the thing, though: you need an HD-capable content source to get the full effect of your new set. If you only have a standard-definition cable box, it won’t deliver HD programming.

But we live in an age of wonder and delight. Beyond Blu-ray, there are plenty of ways to see HD programming on your HDTV without paying for an HD cable package. Most modern TVs have built-in streaming features that let you connect to your home network and watch full-HD content from Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Amazon Instant Video; you can also boost the experience by using a streaming box or HDMI dongle such as Roku, Amazon Fire TV, or Chromecast.

The set’s streaming features and separate streamer devices won’t cover the major networks, though. You can still see shows in delicious HD from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and other local stations by plugging in an antenna and running a channel scan. There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all antenna; you’ll just need to find the perfect fit for your environment.

4K Streaming: Higher Than High-Def

Did you really luck out and get a 4K set? Well, you actually have a growing number of options for content there, too. Netflix and Amazon Instant Video both have Ultra HD content available for streaming, as does YouTube.

Those services use different codecs, though. You’ll need to make sure your set is compatible with the 4K video on each streaming platform: Netflix and Amazon use H.265/HEVC, while YouTube uses VP9. You’ll also need an HDMI 2.0 cable to see 4K video at a frame rate higher than 30fps.