A lot of people are inclined to treat smart TVs as plug-and-play devices, and I get it. Software aside, they're supposed to be a window into our movies, shows, and games, not something you spend a great deal of time thinking about. Imagine if it took 15 minutes just to get a pair of wireless earbuds to sound right — you might think twice about how badly you need your own soundtrack at the gym.
It's genuinely worth tweaking your TV's default picture settings, though. They may seem fine at first glance, but you're almost certainly missing out on the best possible picture, or at least how filmmakers intend things to look. Some defaults may be actively ruining your experience — as you'll find out in a moment.
Motion smoothing
The beast with a thousand names
I absolutely loathe motion smoothing. That might sound strange to some of you, given that it's nominally meant to solve problems with motion blur. The problem lies how it works. It uses a technology called frame interpolation, which inserts artificially-generated frames. This can be fine for some forms of content, such as news or sports — but it tends to sabotage anything shot in the standard cinematic 24 frames per second, creating the dreaded “soap opera effect.” As I like to describe it, this makes a $200 million blockbuster look like it was shot on cheap camcorders for $20,000. You've seen this if you ever caught…