For months, I kept prodding the backlight and brightness sliders on my LG TV, certain the panel itself had gone dim, before I found the actual culprit buried three menus deep.
Luckily, the issue wasn’t my TV. LG’s energy-saving features are spread across a picture preset, a power-limiting slider, and a light sensor. They were doing exactly what they’re designed to do, which is to make the TV dimmer to save power. If you don’t want that, either, here’s where all three settings hide and how to shut them off for good.
Why your LG TV looks darker than it should
It’s all this energy-saving stuff
To improve picture brightness and clarity, ensure your TV is not set to Eco mode. LG ships this energy-saving preset alongside options like Standard, Vivid, Cinema, and Game, and it often sits right next to Standard in the picture mode carousel, making it easy to choose by accident during initial setup. However, according to LG’s own troubleshooting guide, Eco (and the related Auto Power Save preset) is one of the two most common culprits behind a dark or dim display. To fix this, go to Settings > Picture > Picture Mode and switch to Standard, Filmmaker Mode, or Cinema.
Another common cause of a dim display is an aggressive Energy Saving Step setting. Separate from the picture mode, LG TVs feature an “Energy Saving Step” option (sometimes labeled “Energy Saving Steps”) that caps peak panel brightness in progressive stages up to a “Maximum” limit.
As LG’s Energy Saving support page confirms, screen brightness scales directly with this control, so higher levels will noticeably dull your picture. To fix this and restore full brightness, locate Energy Saving Step in your settings menu and set it to Off (note that the exact menu path varies by TV year; see the table below).
Finally, there is the sneakiest culprit of the three: Automatic Power Saving. This feature relies on an integrated ambient light sensor to dynamically throttle screen brightness based on your room’s lighting. Because of this, the display might look perfectly fine during the day, only to turn way too dim the moment you switch off the lights at night—making the root cause remarkably easy to miss.
To fix this, check for Motion Eye Care or AI Brightness Control in your Picture settings and toggle it Off. Alternatively, ensure your Energy Saving Step is set to Off rather than Minimum, Medium, or Maximum, which locks in consistent, uninterrupted panel brightness regardless of room light.
LG TV energy saving settings
LG relocates these power management controls for almost every webOS generation, making the correct menu option surprisingly tricky to find. To keep you from hunting through dozens of sub-menus, the table below maps out the exact navigation path to disable Energy Saving Steps based on your TV’s release year and software version.
|
Model Year & webOS Version |
Menu Path to Turn Off Energy Saving Step |
Notes & Model Variations |
|---|---|---|
|
2026 and Newer (webOS 26+) |
Settings > All Settings > System > Energy Saving > Energy Saving Step > Off |
Restructured under the main System menu. |
|
2022–2025 (webOS 22–25) |
Settings > All Settings > General > Energy Saving > Energy Saving Step > Off |
OLED Models: May nest under General > OLED Care > Device Self Care > Energy Saving Steps instead. |
|
2021 (webOS 6.0) |
Settings > All Settings > Support > OLED Care > Device Self Care > Energy Saving Steps > Off |
Covers both OLED and LCD/QNED series running webOS 6.0. |
|
2020 and Older (webOS 5.0 or earlier) |
Settings > All Settings > Picture > Energy Saving > Off |
Located directly inside the main Picture menu on legacy software. |
LG’s official documentation can sometimes be inconsistent between OLED and LCD/QNED models for 2022+ sets, so your own set’s path could look different.
If you still can’t find these options or if LG has shuffled the menus on a newer software update, you can always reset your picture settings to factory defaults. According to LG’s picture troubleshooting guide, restoring your picture defaults clears out active Eco or Auto Power Save modes instantly, giving you a clean baseline to reconfigure your display.
Check these settings before you blame your TV
Before you assume your TV’s panel is starting to fail (or pack up your brand-new TV to return as defective), take a few minutes to check these three hidden settings: your Picture Mode, Energy Saving Step, and Auto Power Save mode.
Out of the box, almost all LG TVs are configured with aggressive energy-saving defaults designed to meet efficiency standards rather than deliver peak picture quality. Because these controls can restrict panel brightness automatically based on room lighting or factory limits, a dim display is far more likely to be a software setting than a hardware issue.
Disabling these settings only takes a few seconds once you know where to look, and doing so will instantly unlock the full brightness and visual potential of your screen.
