If dark scenes are too dark on your TV, play around with these settings
There's a common frustration among TV lovers: watching a thrilling movie or a gripping show, only to find that the dark scenes are just too dark. It's not just a minor annoyance; it can make key moments borderline impossible to understand. Think back to the infamous 2019 Game of Thrones episode, "The Long Night," which left many fans squinting at their screens, wondering what was happening amidst the murky visuals. While the show's cinematographer argued that the content itself wasn't too dark, the real culprit for many viewers was often their TV's settings. It's a fundamental truth that many people overlook: your TV, right out of the box, isn't always set up to deliver the best picture quality, especially for scenes rich in shadows and subtle detail.
This issue isn't limited to big-budget fantasy epics. Even art-house films designed with intentional darkness can suffer. For instance, the horror movie Skinamarink, which relies heavily on a shadowy, unsettling atmosphere, failed to impress some viewers because their TVs simply couldn't render those delicate dark tones properly. In many cases, this isn't a problem with the film's artistic direction, but rather with the display technology or – more commonly – how the TV is configured. Older or more basic 4K TVs, like my own 2019 Roku model, often lack the advanced technical capabilities to truly distinguish between different shades of black and gray. They might merge subtle shadows into a single, flat dark blob, losing all the intricate details the filmmaker intended. However, when I upgraded to a mid-range TCL QM6K mini LED TV, the difference was immediately noticeable. These newer displays, especially those employing technologies like Mini LED or the superior OLED, are simply better equipped to handle deep blacks and fine shadow details. They can illuminate bright areas intensely while keeping dark areas truly dark, providing the necessary contrast for a compelling viewing experience. You might be surprised at what even the best 4K TVs available today can achieve compared to their predecessors.
The good news is that you don't always need to buy a brand-new, expensive TV to fix this problem. While an upgrade can certainly offer a dramatic improvement, especially if your current TV is several years old or a budget model, there are many effective ways to improve your viewing experience with the television you already own. By making a few simple adjustments to your TV's picture settings, you can significantly enhance how dark scenes appear, bringing out previously hidden details and making your favorite content much more enjoyable. This guide will walk you through universal tweaks that apply to most modern TVs, helping you optimize your display for the best possible dark scene performance.
For serious film enthusiasts who frequently enjoy movies or shows in a dimly lit or dark room, investing in an OLED TV is almost always the ultimate recommendation. These displays offer unparalleled black levels and contrast, which are crucial for rendering dark scenes perfectly. However, if you're either waiting for the next big TV sale or you genuinely believe your current television has more to offer, there's absolutely no harm in experimenting with its settings. In fact, it's often essential. Many TVs come with default settings that are designed for bright showroom floors, or they employ "AI-enhanced" features that, while seemingly advanced, can actually distort the picture in ways that are detrimental to dark content. These automated settings might over-brighten shadows, introduce unwanted motion smoothing, or artificially boost colors, all of which detract from the director's original vision, especially in dimly lit scenes.
The good news is that you don't need a deep, technical understanding of TV specifications to make a significant difference. Most of the adjustments we'll discuss are straightforward and can be found within your TV's main picture settings menu. While specific viewing modes and the level of granular control might vary slightly depending on your TV brand and how old or new your model is (for example, Samsung's newer TVs might offer a "Shadow Detail" bar for precise control, which older models might lack), there are several universal tweaks that can dramatically improve how your TV handles dark scenes, regardless of its make or model. Let's dive into these essential adjustments.
Turn Off Any Light Sensors
Before you even touch your TV's settings, the first and most crucial step is to control your viewing environment. Make the room you're watching TV in as dark as possible. This means closing curtains or blinds to block out natural light and turning off any lamps or overhead lights. Why is this so important? Because external light sources – whether it's sunlight streaming through a window or the glare from a nearby lamp – can severely degrade the perceived contrast of your TV screen. Glare washes out colors, reduces the depth of blacks, and makes it incredibly difficult to distinguish details in dark areas. A truly dark room allows your TV's blacks and grays to appear at their best, giving them the optimal chance to be, well, truly contrasted against brighter elements on screen.
However, even with a dark room, many modern TVs try to "help" by automatically adjusting their display based on the ambient light in the room. These features, often called "ambient light sensors," "eco sensors," or "adaptive brightness," use a small sensor on the TV's bezel to measure the surrounding light. In theory, this sounds like a great idea: the TV should brighten in a sunny room for visibility and dim in a dark room to save energy and be easier on the eyes. The problem is that these sensors often wind up overcompensating, especially in dim environments. Instead of gently dimming to match a dark room, they might brighten the screen too much, particularly in shadowy areas. This over-brightening can lift black levels, making what should be a deep black appear as a murky gray. The result is an inaccurate picture that lacks depth and contrast, making dark scenes look flat and devoid of detail. Not only does this ruin the cinematic experience, but an overly bright screen in a dark room can also be physically uncomfortable and lead to eye strain or headaches.
This is a common issue that sparks many discussions online. A quick search on Reddit reveals numerous queries from users asking how to best manage their TV's auto-dimming settings or light sensors. The overwhelming and consistent advice from experienced users and home theater enthusiasts is simple and effective: just turn it off. Disabling this feature ensures that your TV's brightness and contrast settings remain consistent, reflecting the choices you make manually (or via specific picture modes) rather than reacting to dynamic room conditions. You'll typically find this setting in your TV's "Picture" or "Display" menu, often under sub-menus like "General," "Eco Settings," or "Power Saving." Look for options like "Ambient Light Sensor," "Eco Sensor," "Intelligent Sensor," or "Adaptive Brightness" and switch them off. This small change can make a surprisingly large difference in how well your TV renders those crucial dark scenes, allowing the true blacks and subtle shadow details to shine through as intended.
Turn Off HDR
High Dynamic Range, or HDR, has become a buzzword in the world of televisions, promising a vastly improved picture with more vibrant colors and starker contrast. At its core, HDR is a technology that allows your TV to "translate" a much wider range of color and contrast data from the original source, mimicking what the camera lens initially captured. Unlike Standard Dynamic Range (SDR), which has a more limited color space and brightness range, HDR can display brighter whites, deeper blacks, and a richer spectrum of colors. This capability is incredibly impressive for content designed to be vivid and bright, such as nature documentaries with breathtaking landscapes or sports broadcasts where the green of the field and the saturated team jerseys pop with incredible realism. The biggest advantage here is that specific content can achieve much higher peak brightness and a broader contrast ratio, making the picture appear more lifelike and impactful.
However, despite its immense potential, HDR is not a one-size-fits-all magic solution, and for dark scenes, it can often become a significant disadvantage. The performance of HDR relies heavily on your TV's ability to output high "nits" (a measure of brightness) and to control its backlight with extreme precision. While high-end TVs, especially OLEDs, can excel at this, many mid-range and budget LED/LCD TVs struggle. When these TVs attempt to display HDR content, particularly dark scenes, their limitations become glaringly obvious. The reliance on a strong backlight combined with the HDR signal's instruction to differentiate between many shades of black and white can often lead to low-light settings looking desaturated and, paradoxically, rather gray. Instead of deep, inky blacks, you might see a lifted, grayish black, and crucial shadow details can be lost or "crushed" – where different dark tones blend into one indistinguishable blob. This happens because the TV's backlight, even with local dimming zones, cannot completely turn off individual pixels like an OLED can, leading to light leakage and an inability to achieve true black.
The situation becomes even trickier when a show or movie frequently shifts between extremely colorful, bright scenes and very shadowy ones. Your TV's dynamic response to these shifts in HDR can sometimes be jarring or inconsistent. To truly get the best out of HDR, especially if you plan to keep it enabled, some level of calibration might be required. PCMag's guide on how to calibrate your TV offers straightforward steps for the do-it-yourself enthusiast. However, for many, the optimal solution is to have a professional come and calibrate their TV, ensuring that it's perfectly tuned for the best possible picture across all types of content. (As a side note, Mashable and PCMag share the same parent company, Ziff Davis, which explains their close recommendation.) Professional calibrators use specialized equipment to adjust your TV's settings precisely, accounting for your specific viewing environment and display panel characteristics.
Ultimately, there's a certain freedom and simplicity in simply watching content in SDR (Standard Dynamic Range). For many low-to-mid-range TVs, and especially for scenes that are predominantly dark, SDR often provides a much more comfortable and accurate viewing experience. This is because SDR doesn't demand the same high peak brightness levels from your TV, which means your display isn't being pushed to its limits in a way that might reveal its weaknesses. With SDR, your TV can focus on displaying a stable, consistent image without the risk of washed-out blacks or crushed shadow details that can occur when HDR is poorly implemented. It's important to remember that 4K SDR is absolutely a thing. You can still enjoy all the resolution-related benefits of 4K upscaling and a sharp picture without the potential pitfalls that HDR can introduce, such as overly pixelated or artificially brightened shadows in content that wasn't mastered for it. Don't be afraid to switch your TV's picture mode to an SDR equivalent (like "Standard" or "Cinema" without HDR activated) and see if your dark scenes improve.
Not all streaming services even support HDR
This might seem obvious, but it's a critical point: ensure that the content you're watching or playing actually supports HDR. Many people assume that because their TV is HDR-capable, all content will automatically look better in HDR. This isn't true. Content producers must master their shows and movies specifically for HDR, and streaming services need to offer these HDR versions. This support can vary wildly, not just between different services, but even within a single service based on your subscription tier. For example, Netflix's Premium tier is typically where you'll find most of its HDR content, denoted by a small "HDR," "Dolby Vision," or "HLG" badge next to the title. Hulu, on the other hand, still has relatively limited content with the HDR badge, mostly confined to a select few Hulu originals. If you've been sitting through some borderline unwatchable dark scenes lately, with shadows looking murky or details disappearing, it's quite possible that your newer TV is trying to force an HDR display mode on content that literally doesn't support it. Many TVs, when they detect an HDR signal (even a false one from an upconverting source) or are simply set to an HDR picture mode, will attempt to process SDR content as if it were HDR. This can lead to an artificial, over-processed look, often resulting in exaggerated highlights, crushed blacks, and colors that appear unnatural. It’s a prime example of how HDR can, in fact, make things worse instead of better if not handled correctly. Always check the content details or your TV's info display to confirm if what you're watching is genuinely in HDR before troubleshooting other settings. If it's SDR, switch your TV to an appropriate SDR picture mode for optimal viewing.
Experiment with Filmmaker Mode
In the quest for an authentic cinematic experience at home, "Filmmaker Mode" has emerged as a powerful tool. When viewed in the right environment – critically, a dark room – this mode aims to present dark scenes as close as possible to how they would look in a professional movie theater, and more importantly, how the director and colorist intended them to be seen. The motivation behind Filmmaker Mode was a direct response from content creators who grew frustrated with how consumer TVs often distorted their artistic vision through aggressive picture processing.
Like the issues with HDR on incompatible content, other modern picture processing features, while marketed as enhancements, don't always do content justice. These features include things like "motion smoothing" (often called the "soap opera effect"), "noise reduction," "dynamic contrast," and artificial sharpening. On a movie set, directors and cinematographers are meticulous about every frame. They don't have motion smoothing artificially interpolating frames, nor do they apply heavy noise reduction that can erase cinematic grain or fine texture. So, at its core, Filmmaker Mode is exactly what it sounds like: it essentially strips back these post-production, after-the-fact enhancement settings that often go too hard on your TV, allowing the viewer to see precisely what the filmmaker originally wanted to capture. It turns off motion interpolation, maintains correct aspect ratios, preserves original frame rates, and disables over-aggressive noise reduction and sharpening. This means that the subtle nuances in dark scenes, the delicate interplay of light and shadow, and the intended mood are preserved without being artificially altered by the TV's processing algorithms. Filmmaker Mode doesn't just apply to dark scenes, but its impact on them is particularly profound, as it prevents the TV from trying to artificially brighten shadows or remove subtle film grain that adds to the scene's atmosphere.
While Filmmaker Mode is designed to be a "set it and forget it" solution for picture accuracy, most TVs still allow you to tweak certain settings like color and tone mapping even when this mode is on. This can be beneficial if you find the picture slightly too dim or lacking a certain vibrancy in your specific viewing conditions, allowing you to balance out some of the perceived lacking richness from the disabled automatic enhancements. However, it's generally recommended to make minimal adjustments to maintain the mode's integrity.
If you're someone who champions the movie theater experience – and who appreciates a truly pitch-black living room when movie nights take place at home – you should absolutely try turning on Filmmaker Mode. It's usually found in your TV's "Picture Mode" or "Viewing Mode" settings. Initially, the image might appear a little darker or less vibrant than you're used to, especially if you've been watching with motion smoothing or dynamic contrast features enabled. This is because you're seeing the content as it was truly made, without artificial boosts. Give your eyes some time to adjust, and you'll likely come to appreciate the natural, film-like quality. And, if you've tried Filmmaker Mode in the past and found your screen to be a little too dark, reconsider the lighting situation of that room. Even the subtle glow of a dim, "vibey" lamp – while aesthetically pleasing – can be enough to muddy dark scenes in Filmmaker Mode, preventing it from delivering its full potential. For Filmmaker Mode to truly shine, your room should be as dark as possible, mimicking a cinema environment. This ensures that the subtle gradations of black and gray, which are crucial to the mode's accuracy, are perceived correctly by your eyes.
What TVs have the best dark scene performance?
When it comes to achieving unparalleled dark scene performance, especially for viewing in any environment that isn't broadly lit by daylight, OLED TVs are almost unanimously recommended by experts and enthusiasts alike. The fundamental difference lies in their display technology. Traditional LED and QLED TVs (which use a layer of nanocrystals to enhance color and brightness by reflecting light coming from behind them) rely on a backlight panel that illuminates all the pixels. Even with advanced "local dimming" technologies, where sections of the backlight can be dimmed or turned off, it's impossible to achieve a true, perfect black because light can still bleed into adjacent darker areas. This phenomenon is often referred to as "blooming" or "haloing," where bright objects on a dark background appear to have a glow around them.
OLED TVs, on the other hand, don't use a backlight at all. OLED stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode, and their screens are made up of millions of individual, self-lit pixels. Each one of these pixels can generate its own light and, crucially, can also completely turn itself off independently. When a scene calls for an absolute black – like the vast emptiness of space or the deepest shadows in a horror film – the OLED pixels in those areas simply switch off. This allows for what is often described as "perfect blacks" or "infinite contrast." Because there's no light being emitted from those pixels, they truly appear as black as the off-screen void. This capability results in incredibly deep blacks and far more contrasted dark scenes than what any QLED or traditional LED TV can achieve. The perfect black provides a canvas against which even slightly brighter elements pop with stunning clarity, revealing intricate details in shadows that would otherwise be lost on other display types. This also eliminates blooming, as there's no backlight to bleed.
While the picture quality of OLED is undeniable, there aren't as many OLED TV options to choose from compared to the vast array of QLED and LED TVs on the market. Furthermore, the purchase decision is still a significant one, as OLED TVs generally remain the most expensive type of television, particularly at larger screen sizes. However, as the technology matures, prices are becoming more accessible, and the performance benefits for dark scene viewing are often considered well worth the investment for cinephiles. There are a handful of OLED models that consistently show up as "the best OLED TV" in various tech reviews and buying guides across Google. These recommendations typically align with the few OLED TVs that enthusiasts in online communities, such as r/hometheater on Reddit, are always hyping up. These tend to be models from leading manufacturers like LG and Samsung, who have consistently pushed the boundaries of OLED technology, offering different tiers to suit various budgets and needs. When considering an OLED, look at aspects like the processor (which affects upscaling and overall image quality), refresh rate (important for gaming), and connectivity options to ensure it meets all your viewing requirements, not just dark scene performance.
Ultimately, enhancing your TV's dark scene performance is about understanding how your display works and making informed choices about its settings. Whether you're fine-tuning an older LED TV or investing in a cutting-edge OLED, a little knowledge and experimentation can dramatically transform your viewing experience. By taking control of your TV's picture settings, you'll uncover the rich detail and atmospheric depth that filmmakers intended, making every dark scene not just watchable, but truly immersive. Don't let your TV's defaults diminish your entertainment; unlock its full potential and enjoy movies and shows the way they were meant to be seen.
from Mashable
-via DynaSage
