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Changing these 6 settings on my Samsung TV greatly improved the performance

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Kerry Wan/ZDNET

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Say you recently picked up a shiny new TV. You unbox it like a kid at Christmas and prepare to indulge in all its visual glory. You think to yourself, "This is 2025. TV technology is sizzling, and it's going to look amazing no matter what." So you plug it in and don't take one look at the default settings. Big mistake.

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I've been guilty of it. And I'm OK with that because it's widely accepted that the majority of consumers neglect to alter the most basic settings when setting up their TVs. Even if your TV is a few years old, you may have never modified its defaults.

For Samsung TVs, in particular, you can change a few settings to improve your viewing experience and make a dystopian survival thriller look that much more appealing. The following are six tips for doing just that.

1. Turn off Eco Mode

Kerry Wan/ZDNET

Pretty much all TVs now come with a form of "Eco Mode" turned on by default. Eco Mode is designed to limit power usage by attenuating the TV's brightness and reducing its contrast level. A recent study found that enabling Eco Mode saves as little as $7 a year on your electric bill. (That's literally less than two cents per day.) Whether "eco" is short for economy or ecology, that's not a significant saving, and there are myriad ways to more effectively reduce your carbon footprint.

Also: I changed these 5 TV settings to lower my electric bill. Here's why they work

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