Does Your 4K TV Look Grainy? Try This

You've done your research. You grab one of the best smart TVs on the market, you install it with all the right cables attached, and you're all excited to see the high-quality visuals. Except, you turn on the set, and it's blurry, grainy, or pixelated. What gives? A 4K TV should look incredible, vivid, detailed, and clear. But sometimes, the default settings on a TV can interfere. If you're noticing your TV is blurry or grainy, try checking these settings.

First, hidden under Settings > Picture or something similar, you'll want to make sure sharpness is turned down. That's because sharpness actually comes with a feature called "edge enhancement" when it's cranked all the way up. It seems like this would help with details, but edge enhancement creates a thin line or halo around the edges of items. That can add grainy noise or distortion in the image, especially at a high resolution. If you insist on adjusting the sharpness, fine tune it to match what you're watching, and turn it down until the media isn't showing those glowing or distorted edges.

Another setting you'll want to turn off is Motion Smoothing. This is also sometimes called Motion Plus, TruMotion, Auto Motion, or MotionFlow on various brands. It creates extra frames to give the illusion of a higher frame rate, since most movies are shot at 24 frames-per-second versus your 60 frames-per-second or 120 frames-per-second-capable TV. It ends up making things look choppy and unrealistic at higher resolutions, which can also make things seem extra blurry or grainy during action scenes.

The first thing to understand is that every TV model and every brand has a different default configuration and a different settings menu, sometimes with unique options. Moreover, the same bulk of excellent TV settings that would boost picture quality normally can also make it worse depending on the media, format, and content. Motion Smoothing is a great example. It's best used for real-life content like news broadcasts, but not great for sports, video games, or fast action scenes. The Filmmaker Mode on most smart TVs will actually turn off motion smoothing altogether.

Another setting to disable is your TV's Eco Mode, which is designed to keep the set in a low-performance, low-energy usage mode that's more environmentally-friendly. It also significantly reduces power consumption, ruining your TVs brightness levels and making the picture look washed out and blurry.

If possible, disable noise reduction modes or turn down levels if enabled, avoid using the default Dynamic or Vivid presets for picture quality, and disable Overscan if it's on. These settings all adjust or modify picture quality in some way which could tone down or limit the visuals — Vivid or Dynamic presets often crank up the sharpness and turn on some of those settings you don't want. Of course, it's always best to adjust these settings to a level that matches what you prefer, you may like the way the picture quality looks with some of these on and that's okay.