u/Dear-Bumblebee5999

Hi all,

This is kind of a follow up post to my previous post about counterintuitive settings for local dimming and adaptive contrast.

If you want the TLDR, get straight to the point..if you want to almost completely remove haloing or glow around faces on Hisense TVs, set:

Local dimming = low

Adaptive contrast = medium.

You may then have to bump your basic back-light brightness up a little to compensate, but this will give you the most faithful representation of the image and more or less completely free from haloing and overly dark areas / crushed blacks.

The more detailed information is as follows.

Local dimming order actually goes low>high>medium.

(So low is actually low!) What you find on high and medium is that a far more aggressive processing kicks in. It pushes and pulls illumination to give a brighter and more 3D like effect. At first, it may look better to you, However. It does come with significant artefacts, especially in dimly lit scenes within movies, and halos appear on anything well lit within the scene.

Adaptive contrast.

Similar to the above, really. (Except this time, the order is medium>low>high, so im recommending you set to its lowest setting...labelled medium!)

If you pay attention to the way out of focus backgrounds are displayed while adjusting this you'll get a real flavour of what its doing. It really artificially enhances contrast, edges detail.

Again, this can look good at first, but you will find high setting kind of over clips faces with contrast and medium (labelled low) can sometimes be too dim. Both of which you might consider as almost like an 'effect' or enhancement filter ontop of the original image.

Low (labelled medium) again provides the most faithful representation of the original image, while still supplying a basic level of contrast enhancement.

Personally, I would for 90% of things keep local dimming on low, and dynamic contrast on low (labelled medium) and only introduce a little more dynamic contrast with certain movies that have been shot too 'flat' in the first place....example....Rebel Moon on Netflix.

Hi all.

Audio visual engineer by trade here. I tend to poke into settings a lot. Its my job!

This might be helpful. Certainly applies for EU U8Q on vidaa, and probably applies to a large range of other models.

Local dimming:

'Strenth' order actually goes off-low-high-medium from lowest to highest setting.

Adaptive contrast similarly weird:

'Strength' goes off-medium-low-high from lowest to highest setting.

What this actually means.

Local dimming...don't have it off because then you have the equivalent of a non-local dimming LED / LCD screen. The setting labelled 'medium' provides the strongest local dimming, most 'pop' it's the setting id recommend most but it may make dimly lit scenes crush to black too hard, in which case id recommend dropping it back to medium (labelled high) to bring up your shadow detail a little.

Adaptive contrast makes the biggest impact to image quality. Probably the most powerful setting inside your TV to adjust to your own taste.

On low (labelled medium) you get very mild contrast boosting, and the image largely remains faithful to the original source footage.

On medium and high (labelled low & high) a more powerful pronouced algorithm kicks in which actually alters the source footage (significantly) to make the image 'pop' a lot more...artificial HDR type of effect. Pushes shadows darker and sharpens highs to enhance detail. Looks great EXCEPT for darkly lit scenes. See any big halos around people's faces? That's an artefact of this setting. Want to kill that glowing halo? Goto low (labelled medium) at the cost of no longer benefiting from its sharpening magic.

These two settings almost can be played off each other a little bit..so say for example you like the dynamic contrast at its most powerful setting, but are seeing strong halos around faces in dark scenes, you can try and steer that away a little by dropping your local dimming back a notch to medium strength (labelled high remember) which will pull up the shadow detail a little and help reduce the haloing.

But if the really big halos annoy you, then only option is to forget adaptive contrast and put it on its lowest setting (labelled medium) and then you might as well put local dimming to high strength (labelled medium also) to get maximum pop that way with a more 'true' image.

Confusing right.

Play around and it will make sense!

Key takeaways:

Local dimming : off-low-high-medium

Adaptive contrast : off-medium-low-high