“Why did it look so much better on the retail store’s floor than in my living room?” You’re not the only person to have thought that after unboxing a new TV at home. That’s because stores jack up the brightness on demonstration TVs to ludicrous levels to catch your attention and draw you over.
It’s an attention-getter, but it’s not the best way to watch your shows, movies, and documentaries.
Why TVs get so bright
We’re not all that different from the chimpanzee mesmerized by a foil pinwheel or a cat who chases after a set of jangling keys. Humans are animals, and more specifically, the kinds of animals who like shiny, bright things.
Those retailers selling TVs on their shop floors know this, and all those TVs are sitting in the presence of many other competing, bright, shiny displays under eye-meltingly vivid fluorescent lights. So they crank the brightness up to super high.
It looks impressive, but a brightness setting too high doesn’t just cause eye strain. It can degrade picture quality, making bright areas of a shot look washed out, and black regions look gray. It just isn’t how the TV show’s or movie’s creator intended for it to look.
Nits is a unit of measure for a display’s brightness. The higher the number, the brighter the screen can get. Screen brightness is essential when you have a TV (or laptop, monitor, smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, etc.) that’s being struck by direct light, most typically sunlight.
TV manufacturers and retailers use this as a significant selling point in their marketing, but you don’t really need to crank the brightness all the way up.
Dig into your TV’s settings menu. The terminology varies a bit from brand to brand, but as you poke around the sub-menu for video settings, you’ll come across “picture mode,” or something like that.
My go-to move when I get a new TV is to set it to movie mode. You’ll immediately notice the screen gets darker. It’ll seem pretty dark at first because you were looking at a very bright screen.
It’s like when you enter a building after being outside in the sunlight. The room may not actually be all that dark, but it seems so in the first few seconds.
The next time you watch a show or a movie, your TV won’t have the pop of a brightly lit screen. But what you’re watching will look better, with more accurate colors and a closer look at how the director wanted the audience to see it.
The post Why TV Brightness Is Not Your Best Friend: A Breakdown appeared first on VICE.
