Stop Using Automatic Brightness On Your OLED TV - Try This Instead

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You don't have to tell us how phenomenal it can be to watch a movie on an OLED TV. Brands like LG and Samsung put a lot of time and effort into priming their panels to deliver maximum color and brightness, while letting those self-emissive pixels handle the black levels. Out of the box, most OLED TVs are tuned to impress, but there's one feature that might get in the way of uncompromising picture quality: automatic brightness.

For well over a decade, TV manufacturers have used ambient light sensors to adjust screen brightness in real time based on how much window light and ambient glow is in your viewing space. Very recently, manufacturers have also started leveraging ambient light sensors for HDR formats like Dolby Vision 2. The issue is that these sensors tend to be aggressive and will react to even the smallest amounts of light.

This may not be a big deal in the middle of the afternoon, when you want your TV bright enough to overcome sunlight, but it can be distracting if you're trying to watch a movie at night. For midnight viewing, if your ambient sensor decides to boost the backlight, that ultra-bright OLED screen will be painful to look at. That's why we suggest turning off the sensor and creating your own picture presets instead.

Two of the most popular OLED TV brands are LG and Samsung. To disable the former's ambient light sensor, grab your LG remote and navigate to Settings > All Settings > General > Energy Saving, then select Off. On Samsung TVs, the auto-brightness feature is called Brightness Optimization; turn it off by going to Settings > All Settings > General & Privacy > Power and Energy Saving, then set the toggle to Off.

We also recommend disabling Contrast Enhancer and Motion Brightness on a Samsung OLED, as both options can cause brightness changes. To do so, go to Settings > All Settings > Picture > Expert Settings, and set Contrast Enhancer to Off. To disable Motion Lighting, go to Settings > All Settings > General > Power and Energy Saving, then select Off. Now your TV won't react to ambient room lighting or on-screen motion, so you can create custom picture presets.

This isn't rocket science; we'll use the built-in presets your LG or Samsung OLED already comes with, plus a couple of our own manual tweaks to dial in the best settings for the mode your TV is set to. And like the writer of this article likes to tell his grandmother, don't be afraid: you won't break anything by changing a picture setting. Plus, you can always hit the Reset to Defaults button to bring everything back to square one.

Generally, OLED picture presets like "Cinema" and "Movie" are your best options for watching movies and shows in a dark room. A lot of the time, these cinematic presets will also disable whatever motion processing your TV is capable of, so no dealing with the soap-opera effect when you're attempting to watch the latest Christopher Nolan film on 4K UHD Blu-ray.

If your OLED TV has Filmmaker Mode, that's even better; this preset was designed to get viewers as close as possible to the visual presentation the creators intended. For daytime TV, you may want to choose a preset like "Standard" for the best balance of brightness, colors, contrast, and motion processing. We still don't like that blasted soap opera effect, though. Fortunately, most LG and Samsung picture settings will let you disable motion smoothing across all inputs or just one (the same goes for applying picture presets).

As far as gaming optimizations go, we've written about console and display fine-tuning several times, and we think it's best to leave input switching and processing to HDMI-CEC. Just make sure the setting is enabled on both your TV and gaming hardware, and note that manufacturers don't call it the same thing: LG uses SIMPLINK, while Samsung calls its version Anynet+.