Best Picture Settings For TCL Roku TV – (100% Tested)
If you’re wondering what are the best picture settings for TCL Roku TV, continue reading!
The TCL Roku TV provides a variety of picture settings meant to adjust the image quality and provide specific enhancements.
Hence, based on your preference and environment you should tweak these settings to fine-tune the experience, so we’re going to walk you through all of them.
Let’s get started, shall we?
What Are The Best Picture Settings for TCL Roku TV?
Starting with the most important picture setting…
1. Picture Mode (Auto)
The general and most important picture setting is the picture mode. This is a complete preset of picture settings, designed to enhance the image quality under specific circumstances.
Changing the picture mode will affect the overall Roku picture quality, concerning a number of subsettings.
Let’s walk you through the different picture mode presets and what they do:
- Auto – Automatically adjusts the picture settings according to what you’re viewing.
- Standard – An optimized picture mode, suitable for everyday viewing of any media.
- Low Power – The “out of the box” preset, optimized to preserve power consumption.
- Vivid – This picture mode will intensify the picture with a lot of color and bright images.
- Movie – This mode is for darker rooms, perfect for a home-theater viewing experience.
- Sport – A picture mode designed for watching high-action content, typically sports.
Keep in mind that this is just a basic explanation of all presets. Feel free to experiment and find the preset that suits the content. Know that you can change the picture mode at any given time.
2. HDR and Dolby Digital
If your TCL Roku TV supports High Dynamic Range (HDR) or Dolby Digital, you will be able to select a preset, which will activate upon HDR content detection.
This is strictly dependent on the TV show or movie you’re viewing, but when activated you will be able to select from two options!
HDR10
All Roku TVs that support HDR10 format can easily display HDR content:
- Dark HDR – This is a balanced HDR preset, for ultimate cinema playback.
- Normal HDR – The picture is brighter, boosting the color and saturation.
- Bright HDR – The picture quality will be vivid, with much brighter colors.
Dolby Vision
Some TCL Roku TV models support HDR content with Dolby Vision.
If your TV does not support Dolby Vision, any content with DD will not appear in HDR, and these options will be unavailable.
Quick Tip: The best option for both HDR (only) and Dolby Digital would be “Dark” as this is how the content is intended to be viewed.
3. Customize Picture
The picture mode can be customized as per user preference by going into the Picture Settings menu and selecting “Customize picture.”
If you have already selected picture mode, adjusting these settings manually will throw off the balance of your preset, but you can easily reset it later.
Here are all the settings and a thorough explanation for each of them:
Backlight
The Backlight controls how bright the overall screen of your TCL Roku TV would be and does not impact the quality of the picture.
If your room is very bright, a higher backlight would work fine, but if you are often viewing content in a dark room, a higher backlight can cause eye strain.
Brightness
The Brightness affects the black level in the picture, adjusting how dark or light the details in the image would look.
The best configuration for brightness should be somewhere in the middle (a moderate setting), but of course, this is entirely up to the viewer and your TV’s environment.
Contrast
The Contrast is the difference between the lightest and darkest areas in your picture, hence making the dark darker and the bright brighter.
The best setting here should be somewhere in the upper range, so the whites are vivid enough, but not losing detail due to over-exaggeration.
Sharpness
The Sharpness enhances the details in the picture, making all edges sharper.
However, the best setting would be somewhere in the Low–Medium range, as adding too much sharpness might cause unusual edges and weird distortions.
Color
The Color is a self-explanatory setting affecting how pronounced the colors in the picture would be.
- Hence, more color will intensify the appearance of all colors, while less color will mute them.
The best setting here is balanced color to prevent dulling the image quality or over-saturating it.
Tint
The Tint, also known as “Hue” affects the green and red tones in the picture, similarly to color, a higher setting will make them vibrant, and a low setting will mute them.
So, we advise leaving this setting to default or selecting a nice balanced option to prevent over-saturating the colors.
Picture size
The Picture size will affect the way the image fits on the TCL Roku TV screen.
This option will not impact the image quality in any variety, so we recommend leaving it to Auto or Direct, so the image is fitted perfectly as per your screen dimensions.
Those were the best picture settings for TCL Roku TV, but if you don’t like how your image looks you can always Reset settings or Apply settings to all inputs.
4. Expert Settings
Note: The expert settings are only available on 4K TCL Roku TV.
The expert settings include some advanced configurations that you wouldn’t ordinarily need to have a nice picture quality.
However, if you would like to explore them, we’ll walk you through!
Note: To reach the expert settings, press the (*) Star button on the remote and go to Picture Settings → Customize Picture Mode → Expert Settings.
Gamma Correction
The Gamma Correction only affects the medium-level brightness, which refers to the details in the shadow. The best setting here would be 2.2, which is ideal for most types of TV content.
Noise Reduction
The Noise Reduction reduces the visual distortion also known as “graininess” or “noise” and can help you achieve better quality in old content. It’s best to keep this option to “Low/Medium.”
Color Temperature
The Color Temperature adjusts the warmth in the picture, providing a bit of a yellow tint.
This can help you fall asleep more easily and prevent eye strain by reducing the vibrancy of the blue.
Color Space
The Color Space controls the range of colors your TCL Roku TV can use. You can select from a few options including Auto, RGB, or Native. We recommend leaving this setting to “Auto.”
Local Dimming
The Local Dimming will improve the dark scenes in your image by providing contrast to the black color.
You can freely set this setting to “Medium” or “High” and enjoy immersive depth.
Action Smoothing
The Action Smoothing artificially increases the frame rate of the played content to reduce the motion blur and make everything smoother.
Enabling this setting is great when viewing sports.
LED Action Clarity
The LED Action Clarity also reduces motion blur by flashing the backlight during the fact-action scenes.
However, “Low” or “Medium” here is the best setting to prevent constant TV flickering.
Quick Tip: If you don’t like how your picture looks after the adjustments, just “Reset settings”.
Best Picture Settings for TCL Roku TV for Gaming?
Whenever playing games on your TCL Roku TV, the primary problem is the input lag or display lag, which is the response time after your inputs.
However, with the correct picture settings, you can minimize the input lag tremendously, and play your video games with real-time responses.
Note: If you have a connected game console that supports Game mode, it will automatically enable it on your TCL Roku TV.
How to Enable TCL Roku TV Game Mode?
- Select the HDMI port where the console is connected.
- Press the “*” Star button on the TCL Roku TV remote.
- Using the directional pad go down to “Picture settings.”
- Choose “Game mode” and make sure that it is “ON.”
Note: The input lag is not limited to selecting the Game mode on the TV, as it could often come from the console’s resolution, settings, etc…
Finn Wheatley, a Master’s graduate in Computer Science from UCL, London, honed his skills at small data science consultancies. There, he helped large corporations enhance their data capabilities by deploying cutting-edge machine learning analytics and resolving technical hurdles.