How to make your TV picture look better for Christmas movies – three settings you must switch

DON’T let simple TV mistakes ruin your Christmas movies.

If you’re settling down to watch a festive special, you’ll want to check three television settings right away.

1

Motion Smoothing

Motion Smoothing is one of the most controversial TV settings of all time.

It’s designed to make your TV footage smoother using some clever trickery.

Most movies are shot at 24 frames per second – but many TVs refresh at 60Hz, or 60 times a second.

Motion Smoothing adds extra “fake” frames to create a frame-rate and refresh rate match-up.

But we’ve all become very familiar with 24fps movies – so this smoothing can make movies look very odd.

Hollywood bigwigs including Martin Scorcese and Tom Cruise have also spoken out against the feature.

They say it’s not how the movies were intended to look.

So try turning it off in your TV settings and see if you prefer it.

Filmmaker Mode

Filmmaker Mode is now available on many TV models and is designed to showcase movies as their creators intended.

The UHD Alliance explains: “Filmmakers, Hollywood studios, consumer electronics companies and the UHD Alliance have collaborated to make this next-level home theater viewing experience possible.

“By disabling all post-processing (e.g. motion smoothing) and preserving the correct aspect ratios, colors and frame rates, Filmmaker Mode enables your TV to display the movie or television show’s content precisely as it was intended by the filmmaker.”

Here’s a list of what Filmmaker Mode does:

• Maintain source content frame rate & aspect ratio
• White Point: D65
• Motion Smoothing/Interpolation: OFF
• Overscan: Only if signaled with the image
• Sharpening: OFF
• TV Noise Reduction: OFF
• Other image “enhancement” processing: OFF

Plenty of TV brands offer Filmmaker Mode, including: BenQ, Hisense, LG, Xiaomi, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Skyworth, and Vizio.

Eco Mode

Eco Mode (or anything similarly named) is designed to reduce the amount of power that your TV consumes.

It’s a great feature that you could very well leave on all the time.

But on some TV models, it reduces the brightness and dulls the color of the picture you’re seeing.

So if you’re about to watch something visually spectacular, consider turning it off.

This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk