The TV-buying experience has a lot in common with buying paint: it always looks different in your home than it did in the store. While paint colors look different on your wall because the gods delight in small miseries, TVs have special picture settings just for store display units that push them to the limit and are designed to grab your attention from the next department over.

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Retail picture modes boost contrast, color saturation, 4K upscaling, and motion smoothing to create a very bold image, but don't always reflect how a TV will look in your home when using a common preset or a custom picture mode.

While most new smart TVs automatically boot into home mode when being set up, it's possible to accidentally enable a demo mode or have it toggled on after a factory reset. Thankfully, each brand has made it a very simple process to disable store modes or toggle between them and home mode presets.

Whether it's called Demo Mode, Store Mode, or Retail Mode, each brand's flavor of picture setting does the same thing: boost key aspects like contrast, brightness, and motion smoothing to get a bolder-looking image that grabs your attention in the store.

Colors are often much more saturated than in home-use picture modes, creating much more vivid pictures that may come at the expense of color accuracy. Brightness is also cranked to the nth degree to compete with other screens and harsh fluorescent lights.