Cinema Home Vs. Filmmaker Mode: Which Picture Setting Should LG TV OLED Owners Use?

Owning an incredible TV that can handle any movie, TV show, video game, or device casting you want to throw at it is an excellent feeling. To that end, one brand we can always recommend is LG. While the manufacturer has a number of LED and LCD models to choose from, LG is perhaps most revered for its award-winning 4K OLED TVs. LG OLEDs deliver rich colors and unbeatable black levels — thanks to self-emissive pixels that can be turned completely off — and they're also getting much brighter, especially over the last couple of years.

Out of the box, you'll be able to pick from an assortment of picture presets on an LG OLED. Two of these presets are particularly great for movie fans: Cinema Home and Filmmaker Mode. The latter is available across a few TV brands and is designed to deliver the visuals the original creator intended you to experience. The Cinema Home preset is unique to LG TVs, but it also looks and performs quite similarly to Filmmaker Mode, at least before any additional adjustments are made.

I own the LG C5 Series and compared the two presets. As you may have guessed, the picture setting you should use really boils down to personal preference. For me, my vote goes to Filmmaker Mode, but another user may very well prefer Cinema Home. Let's dive deeper into my findings to figure out why.

Quickly switching back and forth between Cinema Home and Filmmaker Mode was one of the only ways for me to tell the difference between the two. Both presets are engineered to capitalize on cinematic sources — be it an HDR-encoded Netflix stream or a 4K UHD Blu-ray disc — but Cinema Home does so in a slightly brighter fashion. I ran a 4K test video (via YouTube) of a sunny day at Epcot, and the blue sky definitely popped more when set to Cinema.

That said, I still really liked the picture that Filmmaker Mode delivered; it was just a little different. For one, it wasn't as bright as Cinema Home, which is feedback you'll find repeated on multiple LG TV subreddits. In my opinion, though, the luminance sacrifice was worth it, because I thought that the colors looked richer and more accurate. I also thought the preset looked a little softer; sharpness is no friend to natural film grain, and it's a chief exploiter of picture maladies like macroblocking and dirty screen effect.

Each preset also supports Brightness, Color, and Clarity sub-settings, and the only difference between the settings of the two presets was sharpness; it was set to 20 for Cinema Home and 10 for Filmmaker Mode. You can adjust these settings further, but one option I suggest staying away from is TruMotion (under Clarity). This is LG's motion interpolation feature, which is switched off by default for both Cinema Home and Filmmaker Mode. Turning it on is essentially going against the content creator's visual intentions.