If You Have a Mini-LED TV, You Need to Enable This Setting

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I reviewed the TCL QM7 a year ago, and I’m still impressed at the quality and value for the money offered by this mid-tier QLED TV. Along with Hisense, TCL has raised the bar for QLED TVs, with both brands battling it out to become the go-to for the best value QLED TV.

One of the highlights of the QM7 is its incredible brightness—up to 2,400 nits, thanks to the mini-LED backlight for the display. But this can actually be overwhelming when watching TV at night in a dark bedroom, especially if you’re getting ready to go to sleep (or if someone else in the room is already trying to sleep). But I found a setting that allows me (and my wife) to coexist with this TV in our bedroom—and your QLED TV likely has it too.

Turn on adaptive-brightness

Having to manually lower the TV brightness every night got old pretty quickly (despite the “quick settings” button on the remote that took me directly to the brightness settings), so I started looking for a way to handle it automatically. Lucky for me, my TCL set has a setting for that—and it’s likely yours does too.

Most modern smart TVs will have a setting with a name like “Adaptive Brightness” that will allow it to auto-adjust the screen brightness based on the light in your environment. That’s the setting you need to turn on so you won’t blind yourself if you want to watch some TV before going to bed.

Here is how to turn it on for the QM7; the process is likely similar for other models and brands:

1. Press the Settings button (gear icon) on your TCL remote.

2. Navigate to Settings and select Display & Sound.

3. Choose Intelligent Settings.

4. In the Intelligent Settings menu, find Intelligent Picture.

5. Turn on the setting called Adaptive Brightness.

The QM7 has a light sensor that detects the light in your room, which it then uses to change your TV’s brightness. My set also offers Adaptive Content, which will automatically adjust your picture settings depending on what’s onscreen. For example, during dark scenes, the TV will dim to preserve shadow detail, and during bright scenes, it will increase highlights to make the picture pop more.

Not every QLED set will offer these exact settings, but most have something similar. Hunt around in the menus and try enabling them if you sometimes find your super-bright screen can be a little overwhelming.