Why TVs look bright and vibrant in stores, but dull in your living room - and how to fix it

Kerry Wan/ZDNET

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ZDNET's key takeaways

Store mode exaggerates brightness, color, and motion for display.

Home mode delivers a more accurate, balanced picture quality.

Switching modes is simple but may require a factory reset.

The TV-buying experience has a lot in common with buying paint: it always looks different in your home than it did in the store. While paint colors look different on your wall because the gods delight in small miseries, TVs have special picture settings just for store display units that push them to the limit and are designed to grab your attention from the next department over.

Also: How to disable ACR on your TV - and why doing so is critical for your privacy

Retail picture modes boost contrast, color saturation, 4K upscaling, and motion smoothing to create a very bold image, but don't always reflect how a TV will look in your home when using a common preset or a custom picture mode.

While most new smart TVs automatically boot into home mode when being set up, it's possible to accidentally enable a demo mode or have it toggled on after a factory reset. Thankfully, each brand has made it a very simple process to disable store modes or toggle between them and home mode presets.

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