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After testing dozens of TVs of the years, I know why they look so different at home

Effort to address domestic violence in Minneapolis leaves questions

Documenters report: St. Paul school board to vote Tuesday on 2026-27 budget

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After testing dozens of TVs of the years, I know why they look so different at home

TCL X11L TV at CES 2026 — Kerry Wan/ZDNET

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.

ZDNET’s key takeaways

Store mode exaggerates brightness, color, and motion for display.
Home mode delivers a more accurate, balanced picture quality.
Switching modes is simple but may require a factory reset.

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.

Also: How to disable ACR on your TV – and why doing so is critical for your privacy

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.

What is store mode?

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.

Also: I test TV refresh rates – here’s when 60Hz is enough (and when it’s not)

While it’s a great way to show off what a TV is capable of with a few menu tweaks, it can sometimes misrepresent what kind of picture quality you’ll get in a typical home theater or living room.

Compared to store mode, with ultra-sharp contrast and oversaturated colors, home mode picture settings may look flatter and less eye-catching. But that’s by design. Home mode isn’t set up to have your TV compete with screens from other brands for your money, it’s there to provide the best viewing experience for your space.

Also: I changed 13 settings on my TV to dramatically improve its performance – here’s how

And with just a few manual adjustments, you’ll be able to get colors, contrast, and detailing that’s very close to the over-the-top picture you see in the store.

How to disable retail picture mode

If you prefer to manually tweak your TV’s picture settings or just want to take advantage of the included preset picture modes, it’s a fairly straightforward process to disable demo or store mode. While many brands have toggles buried in the settings menu, if you have a Fire or Roku TV, you’ll have to do a few extra steps.

Also: Your TV may be tracking your viewing data – here’s how to stop it (beyond disabling ACR)

To help walk you through the process, I’ve broken down each brand’s menu to help you find the correct settings.

Fire TV: An Amazon Fire TV needs to be fully factory reset to disable demo mode. To do this, you can either hold the Back button and the right side of the navigation circle together for 10 seconds or select Settings > My Fire TV > Reset to Factory Defaults. Once the TV has reset, you’ll be able to choose home or demo mode.
Hisense: Settings > System > Advanced System > Usage Mode > Home Mode OR Settings > Device Preferences > Retail Mode
LG: Settings > Support > Home Mode
Roku TV: Like the Amazon Fire TV, a Roku-branded TV needs to be fully reset to factory defaults to choose between store and home modes. You can do this by selecting Settings > System > Advanced System Settings > Factory Reset > Factory Reset Everything. Once your TV has rebooted, you’ll be able to choose home mode.
Samsung: Settings > General & Privacy > System Manager > Usage Mode > Home Mode. If your TV requires a PIN to continue and you haven’t set one up, it will be set to 0000 by default.
Sony: Settings > System > Device Preferences OR Retail Mode Settings > Demo Mode and Picture Reset
TCL: If your TCL runs on the Fire TV or Roku platform, it will need a full factory reset. But if it uses Google TV or another Android platform, you can select Settings > System > Advanced Settings > Usage Mode > Home Mode

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After testing dozens of TVs of the years, I know why they look so different at home

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Effort to address domestic violence in Minneapolis leaves questions

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Documenters report: St. Paul school board to vote Tuesday on 2026-27 budget

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After testing dozens of TVs of the years, I know why they look so different at home

June 23, 2026

Effort to address domestic violence in Minneapolis leaves questions

June 23, 2026

Documenters report: St. Paul school board to vote Tuesday on 2026-27 budget

June 23, 2026

Resiliency Fund checks arrive for Minneapolis businesses

Sara Wordofa, the owner of Katar River Restaurant and Bakery in Minneapolis’ Longfellow neighborhood, originally planned to expand her business in January, with another expansion planned for April.

Then Operation Metro Surge happened. The expansions were delayed, leaving her holding on to several outstanding loans.

“It affected me a lot,” she said in an interview. “Very hard time for me.”

So when Wordofa recently got a letter in the mail from the City of Minneapolis, she opened it excitedly, hoping for a long-awaited confirmation of a $10,000 grant specifically to help with the expansions. Instead, the letter informed her of a refund of her 2026 city licensing fees, totaling $4,666.

“Small money,” she said. “It’s helpful. I bought groceries.”

Owner and chef Sara Wordofa roasts coffee at her Ethiopian restaurant Katar River Restaurant on Thursday, June 11, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minn. Katar received a refund of their licensing fees through the city’s Small Business Resiliency Fund. Credit: Ellen Schmidt/MinnPost/CatchLight Local/Report for America

The refunds are part of the city’s $7 million Small Business Resiliency Fund, aimed at helping businesses recover from the effects of Operation Metro Surge. The fund was approved unanimously by the Minneapolis City Council in February, avoiding the political challenges that faced efforts to help the city’s renters.

But still, the $7 million is only a small percentage of the $700 million in economic damage caused by Operation Metro Surge, according to the most recent city estimates. The majority of the impact came from lost revenue and lost wages, according to the report.

For Wordofa and other local business owners, the dollars are met with something of a grateful shrug. Any help is better than none. But more than actual financial relief, the city’s assistance is arriving as more of a symbol – an acknowledgement that at least city leaders are trying.

Ellen Schmidt/MinnPost/CatchLight Local/Report for America. Small Business Resiliency Fund. — Injera, a spongy Ethiopian flatbread, fills the shelves at Katar River Restaurant on Thursday, June 11, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minn. Owner and chef Sara Wordofa said she supplies many Minnesotan businesses, like hospitals, co-ops and other restaurants, with her injera. Katar received a refund of their licensing fees through the city’s Small Business Resiliency Fund. Credit: Ellen Schmidt/MinnPost/CatchLight Local/Report for America

By design, $4 million of the fund was set aside to cover licensing fees for hospitality businesses, including food, wine, brewery and liquor licenses. $1.75 million went toward refunding license fees that had already been paid, while the remaining $2.25 million will cover fees for those who have yet to pay.

The refunds went through automatically, meaning businesses didn’t need to go through what could’ve been an onerous application process.

“I think that was the right way to go if the goal was [to] help them any way they can as quickly as we can,” said Russ Adams, the manager of corridor recovery initiatives for Lake Street Council, a nonprofit that supports small businesses in the Lake Street corridor.

But that non-targeted approach means that it wasn’t just small, locally-owned businesses that received refunds. Walgreen’s, based in Deerfield, Illinois, received $11,647, according to dollar amounts compiled by the city. Northern Tier Retail LLC, an operator of gas station convenience stores, received more than $18,000. Restaurants like Chipotle and Raising Cane’s and grocery stores like Aldi and Whole Foods saw refunds, too.

Hospitality Minnesota, a statewide trade association representing the state’s hospitality business owners, said in a statement that the refunds were important but that they were “only a Band-Aid for an industry that needs stability and relief from burdensome local and state-imposed mandates.”

The $3 million remaining in the Small Business Resiliency Fund after covering licensing fees will go toward covering event permits in the city and funding business support programs.

Adams praised the effort overall. “You can’t sugarcoat the big gap,” he said. Still, he argued that the city had used “a very small infusion of money” effectively.

It was the State Legislature, Adams said, that should have stepped up to help. A bill that would have provided $100 million in loans to state businesses passed the Senate but couldn’t clear the House.

Meanwhile, Wordofa remains hopeful that her next letter will be the one informing her of her grant funding. Her expansions are set – she hopes – for August. “We are going to survive,” she said.

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