If the environment where your television is located is very bright and you usually watch television in daylight, the best thing you can do is; Buy a TV with good brightness and with a strong enough backlight (FALD, MiniLED, etc.) so that light and reflection do not prevent you from enjoying the content. Although OLED is quite advanced in this regard, it shouldn’t even be an option for such extreme situations.
However, not everyone can afford to buy that “ideal television” for their home. Fortunately, you can take advantage of your Smart TV’s built-in features to tweak the brightness and other settings you need. Allows you to enjoy movies and television series in daylight. One of these options is undoubtedly tone matching.
What is tone mapping and how can you enable it on your Smart TV?
Tone mapping is a technique that allows you to dynamically map brightness and color volume from one display to a different display. It’s very useful for high dynamic range (HDR) content, as it’s often mastered at 1,000, 3,000, or even 4,000 nits of brightness on dedicated displays.
In this way, with tone matching It is possible to adapt brightness and color volume levels from a stage to a screen (our Smart TV), which will often perform worse than the media used to dominate that content. To better understand ourselves, understand ‘adaptation’ as a method of ‘compressing’ certain aspects of the image.
This functionality depends on the metadata obtained by the most complete HDR formats such as Dolby Vision or HDR10+ for each scene. This is how it is obtained Adapt the scene in real time depends on the characteristics of the television and, in some cases, the external lighting (Dolby Vision IQ or HDR10+ Adaptive).
Our smart TVs’ tone mapping corrects the HDR mastered scene so it can be displayed correctly on panels with lower brightness distribution. Image: Mixing light
This technique allows you to benefit from the maximum capabilities of the television, so scenes are displayed in the best possible way, taking into account the technical characteristics of each television. Although high-end Smart TVs on the market generally have great brightness distribution, this is much lower than the panels used to handle HDR content.
This way, if we have content referenced around 1000 nits, tone mapping should be responsible for transferring the brightness and color volume of each scene to a panel with lower brightness distribution. So, if we want scenes mastered in HDR with a reference of 1,000 nits to have the expected performance of, say, 650 nits on a Smart TV, tone mapping needs to be responsible for automatically structuring the image; the lowest possible image quality is lost.
Tone mapping option on Samsung televisions. Image: Samsung
If tone mapping is not enabled on a TV with a much lower brightness distribution than the panel from which the HDR content is copied to the main maximum brightness and black levels in the image are clippedA rather ugly image emerges.
This setting can be found on many HDR televisions today. For example, on Samsung TVs, you can access HDR tone mapping options from the expert options in the TV settings. Samsung, ‘HDR tone trackingin ‘static’ and ‘active’ mode. If we change the mode to ‘active’ the image will achieve a more ‘effective’ color and brightness level.
Dynamic tone mapping for gaming on LG TVs with webOS. Image: LG
This, combined with high levels of brightness, can save you from those moments when light prevents you from watching TV comfortably. LG also has HDR tone mapping options in the settings, even in games (via the HGiG option) and can optimize the image quality according to your television’s capabilities. This option is found by selecting ‘function’ in the ‘advanced settings’ tab of the television.Tone Mapping Compensation‘ (or from the game optimizer if you want to enable HGiG.
Users also have other options to block light falling on the television, such as contrast intensifier or dynamic contrast on some Smart TVs. However, there are cases where this adjustment causes the image to become distorted and causes the image to become highly saturated.
You may want to make changes to these functions depending on the lighting conditions in which you watch your television. But if you decide to watch a movie or TV series, it will always be the most recommended. Reduce lighting in the living room or bedroom as much as possible Where you are to avoid having to resort to this series of options that can spoil the image.
Personally, for home theater lovers, there’s nothing better than a perfectly calibrated television (and with technologies like OLED) placed in a low-lit room to enjoy your favorite series and movies. Of course, we should not forget a good sound system to accompany those noisy scenes.
Cover image | Xataka
In Xataka Smart Home | What almost all smart TVs have in common is a picture mode that looks better than others and is not enabled by default.
Source: Xatak Android
Ben Stock is a hardware enthusiast and author at Div Bracket. He provides comprehensive coverage of the latest hardware advancements, offering readers a technical and in-depth look at the newest products and trends.