How to Turn Off TV Motion Smoothing, Noise Reduction, and Sharpening for a Clean Retro Image

You connected your Super Famicom through a RetroTINK 5X Pro, enabled Game Mode on your 2023 LG OLED, and the pixel art still looks like a smeared, artificially smooth, oversharpened mess. The image has that soap opera effect motion that makes 16-bit sprite scrolling feel wrong. The edges of characters have a white halo you never saw on a CRT. You did the right thing buying a proper scaler, but your TV is still undoing the work. Game Mode reduces input lag. It does not disable every post-processing filter. You need to turn off motion smoothing, noise reduction, and edge enhancement by hand. Here are the proprietary terms for each brand, the exact menu path, and the one setting value that matters.

Motion smoothing is the single worst TV process for retro games. It creates artificial frames between real ones, making a 60 Hz game look like a 120 Hz video. On a 2023 Samsung TV with Game Mode off, verified measurements show this adds 60 to 120 ms of input lag. The effect destroys the crisp, staccato motion of 240p sprite scrolling. Disable it for every retro input.

Samsung: Auto Motion Plus

On a 2023 or 2024 Samsung TV, press the Settings button, go to Picture, then Picture Clarity Settings. Set Auto Motion Plus to Off. The default is On. Leaving it on adds the soap opera effect and roughly 60 to 120 ms of lag depending on the frame rate of the content.

LG: TruMotion

On a 2023 or 2024 LG TV, go to Settings, then Picture, then Picture Mode Settings. Find TruMotion and set it to Off. The default is On. Disabling it removes the artificial smoothness and recovers approximately 50 to 110 ms of lag.

Sony: Motionflow

On a 2023 or 2024 Sony TV, press the Action Menu button, go to Picture Adjustments, then Motionflow. Set it to Off. The default is On. Turn it off for every retro console input.

TCL: Action Smoothing

On a 2023 or 2024 TCL TV, go to Settings, then Picture, then Advanced Settings. Set Action Smoothing to Off. The default is On. Disable it.

Noise reduction filters are designed for compressed video streams. They blur fine detail to hide MPEG compression artifacts. On retro pixel art, this removes the intentional dithering and sharp edges that define 16-bit graphics. The processing adds 5 to 20 ms of input lag. Every major brand sets noise reduction to Auto by default. You must set it to Off.

On a Samsung TV, find Noise Reduction inside Picture Clarity Settings. Set it to Off. On LG, go to Picture Mode Settings and find Noise Reduction. Set it to Off. On Sony, the path is Noise Reduction under Picture Adjustments. Set it to Off. The auto mode is not safe. It activates on signals it misidentifies as noisy, and a 240p signal from a scaler often triggers this misidentification.

Set sharpness to the neutral value for your brand. Not a low number. Any value above zero on a Samsung or LG adds edge enhancement that creates a white halo around sprite edges. This is ringing artifact. It conflicts directly with the CRT simulation filters built into a RetroTINK 5X Pro or a MiSTer FPGA. Those filters simulate the soft, natural edge falloff of a CRT electron beam. Adding TV sharpening on top produces a harsh, artificial outline. FirebrandX, the calibrator who produces the reference CRT profiles for RetroTINK and MiSTer, explicitly warns against this. His reference CRT softness target demands sharpness at the neutral value.

The neutral point differs by brand. On a Samsung TV, the scale runs 0 to 20 and neutral is 0. The default is 10. On an LG TV, the scale runs 0 to 50 and neutral is 0. The default is 25. On a Sony TV, the scale runs 0 to 100 and neutral is 50. The default is 50. A Sony set at 50 is not adding edge enhancement. A Sony set at 51 is. Use the 240p test suite sharpness pattern to verify: the pattern should show no ringing lines extending from the vertical bars. If you see a bright white or dark shadow line beside each bar, your sharpness is too high.

The exact path to disable TruMotion on a 2023 or 2024 Samsung TV is: Settings, Picture, Picture Clarity Settings, Auto Motion Plus set to Off. While you are in that menu, also set Noise Reduction to Off, MPEG Artifact Reduction to Off, and Contrast Enhancer to Off. Contrast Enhancer causes dynamic contrast black level fluctuation that makes dark areas of a game appear to pulse. Leave HDMI Black Level on the correct setting for your source. If your scaler outputs RGB Limited, set it to Low. If it outputs RGB Full, set it to Normal. A mismatch crushes black detail.

A scaler like the RetroTINK 5X Pro applies its own filtering. The CRT simulate filter softens edges in a controlled way that mimics a Sony PVM 20L5. If your TV then adds its own edge enhancement, the two filters fight each other. The result is a double-processed image with visible halos around every sprite. This is the failure mode that most often makes a properly configured scaler look worse than a cheap HDMI converter. Set sharpness to zero on Samsung and LG. Set sharpness to 50 on Sony. Test with the 240p test suite.

Every major TV brand sets MPEG noise reduction to Auto. Auto mode means the TV decides when to apply blur. A 240p signal fed through a RetroTINK 4K can look like a noisy video stream to the TV's processor. The TV engages noise reduction, blurs the pixel grid, and adds 5 to 20 ms of lag. You cannot rely on Game Mode to disable this. On a Samsung, the setting is labelled MPEG Artifact Reduction inside Picture Clarity Settings. On LG and Sony, it is inside Noise Reduction. Set it to Off.

Three other settings degrade retro pixel art even after you disable motion smoothing and edge enhancement. Dynamic contrast creates black level fluctuation that makes a game's shadow areas brighten and darken as the scene changes. Set it to Off. Colour gamut should be set to Auto or Native, never to a specific colour space, because a retro scaler's output does not conform to a standard colour space. HDMI black level must match your scaler's output. A mismatch produces crushed blacks or washed-out blacks. The most common failure is setting HDMI Black Level to Low when the scaler outputs RGB Full, which crushes all shadow detail to black.

The mClassic dongle applies context adaptive anti-aliasing and a mild upscale. It has no off switch for its processing. If you pair an mClassic with a TV that has sharpness above neutral, the mClassic's softening and the TV's edge enhancement produce a conflicting double-processed image. Independent Time Sleuth testing shows the mClassic adds approximately 1 to 2 ms of lag. To avoid the conflict, set TV sharpness to neutral and disable all TV processing before adding the mClassic.

This is for the Hong Kong apartment gamer who needs one display for a PlayStation 5 and a Super Famicom and must understand why the retro console looks wrong on the 4K OLED. It is for the competitive player who perceives milliseconds of input lag in a shmup or platformer and needs every frame clean. It is for the CRT-curious enthusiast who has access to second-hand Sony PVMs in the local market but wants to understand why a modern TV cannot match the CRT look without correct settings. Skip it if you are buying a pre-modded console as a gift with no interest in menus. Skip it if you are a PC gamer upscaling old 3D titles from a Windows desktop. Skip it if you are a modern gamer wanting better anti-aliasing on a PlayStation 5. The single thing that most often goes wrong: you disable motion smoothing, set sharpness to a low number instead of the neutral value, still see halos, and blame the scaler.