Owning an amazing TV that can handle any movie, TV show, video game, or device you want to stream is a great feeling. To this end, one brand we can always recommend is LG. Although the manufacturer offers a number of LED and LCD models, LG is perhaps most revered for its award-winning 4K OLED TVs. LG’s OLEDs deliver rich colors and unbeatable black levels – thanks to self-emitting pixels that can be turned off completely – and they’re also getting a lot brighter, especially over the last couple of years.
Out of the box, you’ll be able to choose from an assortment of picture presets on an LG OLED. Two of these presets are of particular interest to movie buffs: Cinema Home and Filmmaker Mode. The latter is available on a few brands of televisions and is designed to offer the visuals that the original creator wanted you to experience. The Cinema Home preset is unique to LG TVs, but it also looks and functions quite similarly to Filmmaker mode, at least before additional adjustments are made.
I own the LG C5 series and compared the two presets. As you might have guessed, which image setting you should use actually depends on your personal preference. For me, my vote goes to Filmmaker mode, but another user might very well prefer Cinema Home. Let’s take a deeper look at my findings to understand why.
Cinema Home gains brightness, but Filmmaker mode may be a little more precise
Quickly switching between Cinema Home and Filmmaker Mode was one of the only ways for me to tell the difference between the two. Both presets are designed to capitalize on cinematic sources – whether it’s an HDR-encoded Netflix stream or a 4K UHD Blu-ray disc – but Cinema Home does so slightly brighter fashion. I streamed a 4K test video (via YouTube) of a sunny day at Epcot, and the blue skies definitely popped more when set to Cinema.
That said, I always really liked the image provided by Filmmaker mode; it was just a little different. For one thing, it wasn’t as brilliant as Cinema Home, something you’ll find repeated on several LG TV subreddits. In my opinion, however, the luminance sacrifice was worth it, as I thought the colors looked richer and more accurate. I also found the preset to look a bit softer; sharpness is no friend to natural film grain, and it is one of the main exploiters of image illnesses like macroblocking and dirty screen effect.
Each preset also supports brightness, color, and clarity sub-settings, and the only difference between the two presets’ settings was sharpness; it was set to 20 for Cinema Home and 10 for Filmmaker Mode. You can adjust these settings further, but one option I suggest staying away from is TruMotion (under Clarity). This is LG’s motion interpolation feature, which is disabled by default for Cinema Home and Filmmaker modes. Enabling it essentially goes against the visual intentions of the content creator.
