[jiggawatts]

As a data point: Sony, Panasonic, LG, etc… all try to have calibrated TVs that match the director’s intent. As in, the colours and contrast are defined in the standards, and they strive to show them accurately. They do cheat a little bit and have a “demo” mode the cranks up the saturation and brightness in store to compensate for the overhead lighting.

Samsung takes that cheating to 11 and there is no way to turn it off. It’s not “store mode”. It’s permanently “enhanced” to the point of absurdity.

They just don’t care enough to have two modes.

[dTal]

>the colours and contrast are defined in the standards, and they strive to show them accurately

Not to defend Samsung, but this isn't such an objectively straightforward task as you make it sound. It's impossible, in the general case, to convert colors from one colorspace to another without information loss. So there's an element of subjectivity and judgement in selecting the algorithm used. In other words, they're all "enhanced", and your complaint is simply that Samsung has poor taste.

Of course this all assumes that the display is doing its own color management. This is exactly what you want with a standalone TV, but for a computer display you really want to just provide the computer with the ICC profile and give it the lowest-level access to the pixel values possible, so that the user can assume control over the rendering intent - for that you'd want some kind of "direct mode". It's quite right to criticize Samsung if they do not offer such a mode, but are the other brands any better? The trend for TVs seems to lead away from being good general purpose displays, and towards being standalone devices.

[jiggawatts]

> the general case, to convert colors from one colorspace to another without information loss.

Even in the general case that's not true for new televisions: These typically convert from a smaller space to a large one, which can be done 100% losslessly and accurately as intended.

This is quite common, because as TV panel capabilities have largely outstripped the distribution and encoding standards. For example, Rec.709 (the HD standard) is smaller than what any modern 4K TV can display.

The 4K Rec.2020 standard is huge, but it only exceeds typical panel capabilities along the green axis. This may seem like conversion would be lossy, but if you look carefully at video metadata, it ofen specifies that the "content gamut" is smaller. That is, most modern 4K HDR content is mastered on a display that "merely" has a gamut like Display P3, so that's all you need to reproduce it 1:1.

None of this is done by Samsung. They always stretch colours up to the maximum capability of the panel. These days, that's very close to the full Rec.2020 gamut and looks downright garish. Even if "AI enhanced" or whatever, it's wrong. Colours are distorted and nowhere near the original intent.

[FrozenSynapse]

You can definitely turn off the "enhance" on the Samsungs...

[oriolid]

If the feature is there, it's better hidden than others. Some time ago when I was shopping for a TV, it looked like every brand's demo mode hurt my eyes (Samsung was the worst but not only one). On Sony I was able to find the "Cinema Pro" mode that looks quite nice under a minute. And no, I couldn't figure out how to disable microphone or SambaTV so the Sony will never be connected to Internet.