I currently did for 3 modes SDR, HDR and sports. For Dolby Vision I don't have much content that works on it and the default Dolby Vision bright mode looks good to me(I'll adjust it if I need tuning maybe a couple weeks later if I'm getting bored). Anyway, here's what the 3 modes are for:
- HDR: For HDR10 content. Here you want the best specular highlights, accurate white balance for skin tones and a bit of image pop you'd not get on SDR content. Also the image must look very good. I'm NOT going for absolute accuracy here but making the image look as good as possible without making the colours look wrong (that's also my principle with other modes). Mode started from (HDR dynamic, as I want to preserve the accurate modes in their default settings for later reference and I'm modifying every setting anyway).
- Sports: This is for cricket only, and I tuned it using IPL. Currently, the IPL getting streamed is 30 fps AND a bit desaturated. So this mode might not work for 50/60 fps football games as well as it does for cricket. I'll explain the reasoning behind the settings soon, so you might change it as per your preference.(mode started from: sports)
- SDR: Anything not in the above two modes (mode started from: Standard).
An ideal scenario will be 5 modes: SDR bright, SDR dark, HDR bright, HDR dark and sports. But you can just turn the backlight a bit low and make a dark mode, so I won't be dealing with that in this one.
Let me go setting by setting:
Apply picture settings: All sources. Note that this won't apply to all sources, but to this mode on all sources. So standard mode for all sources will be the same, but all sources won't be set to standard. Hope that makes sense. You'll need to check if this mode is set.
Backlight: This is how much your backlight will shine through. Making this high will make your display brighter, setting low will make it darker. However, for HDR content your movie will follow the PQ EOTF curve so you won't get eye-searing brightness unless the scene demands one.
I set SDR to 85, HDR to 100, Sports to 100. For dark rooms/dark modes you can set SDR to 50, HDR to 100 and Sports to 60. Vary this according to your preference.
Local dimming: This is the main feature of this TV. High local dimming will make the blacks really black and make the image pop. However, it will create dirty screen effect(and blooming for black) when there is a uniform background and some high brightness objects on it. For exammple, it will look bad on a cricket match due to the green grass and bright people on it.
I set SDR to high, HDR to high, Sports to low. You can also try SDR to medium, HDR to high and sports to low if you see a lot of banding and blooming on SDR content.
Brightness: This is not your real brightness but weird image enhancement stuff, don't touch this from 50.
Contrast: Another image enhancement. I set it to 50 for SDR, 50 for HDR and 50 for sports.
Sharpness: Again, another setting to generally not mess with. It provides edge enhancement at the cost of halos around bright object. Set to 0-5 for all 3 modes. You can set to a low value (around 10) for sports and SDR if you're watching a lot of SD content and want some edge enhancement.
I found that for 1080p cable content, a sharpness around 5 makes the content look pretty good. For that particular source, you can set 'Apply picture settings' to this source and vary it.
Colour saturation: The most obvious setting. I set it to 50 for HDR, 47 for SDR and 50 for Sports. I need a bit more pop in sports, a bit less in regular SDR content and it's about right for HDR as making it higher will make things look wrong and oversaturated.
Adaptive contrast: Low makes everything look worse, medium and high cause too much black crush. This is a setting for low saturation 80s and 90s shows where the reference image itself is washed out and flat. Keep it off for all 3 modes, can turn on if the contrast is a bit low for a particular source.
Ultra-smooth motion: Motion enhancement. I found that the default settings (smooth, clear, standard) are pretty garbage. Also tried a lot of them in custom but nothing really worked as it introduced motion issues in complex panning shots. Motion processing is not this TV's strong suit. I spent hours tuning this with complex panning videos and honestly couldn't get it perfect.
Off for SDR and HDR, try varying according to your taste for sports.
Noise reduction/MPEG noise reduction: Keep it on low for both. You can also keep it off but low doesn't make a difference for me and it will likely help with low-resolution content.
White balance: The most important setting. Cool is bad and way too coolWarm is a bit too warm for my liking. So I set it to Standard. Your panel may be slightly green/red/blue from true 6500K, so you can go to Expert settings>white balance and increase/decrease the red/green/blue to your liking.
Expert settings: Apart from white-balance set as in the previous setting, you set the colour gamut set to Native. Auto doesn't use the full colour gamut. If you set it to auto, the settings I've mentioned above won't look right and you'll need to set everything yourself.
Also, for gamma leave it to 2.4 for SDR. Sports to 2.4 (adds a bit more contrast to the sky shots and jerseys). HDR you can't adjust gamma because it uses EOTF and not a gamma curve.
A higher gamma will make things look a bit dark and contrasty (Since it's a higher exponential reaching the same final value) and lower gamma will make things look a bit flatter and less contrasty.
If you're following this, any deviation to the recommended settings I've shared should be done AFTER you've made all the changes, not in between. This is for obvious reasons as these settings work great together, not on your own. In the end, you can compare your image quality with other modes and see that this looks so much better.
Let me know how these look for you, or if you've found better settings than these. I'd love to check those out.
and then only I checked rating.
