Smart TVs have become incredibly, um, smart over the years. Entertainment is no longer limited to regular TV channels. You can find an endless range of content on various streaming apps, and you can also stream high-end PC and console games to your Samsung TV over the cloud.
Samsung Smart TVs also have some of the best display technology around that provides strikingly vivid colors and deep contrast, along with high brightness levels that enable viewing of HDR content with deeper blacks and vibrant whites.
Speaking of brightness levels, why is it such a pain to adjust brightness on smart TVs? Whether you get a Samsung smart TV or one from another brand, all of them make you dig through the TV's settings menus. There's no quickly accessible brightness option in the user interface on Samsung smart TVs, and you don't get any buttons for controlling it on the remote, either.
It's unclear why TV manufacturers refuse to make brightness adjustment a faster and more convenient experience. Sure, making the screen too dim can mess with picture quality, colors, and contrast, but that's not exactly an excuse. Most smart TVs can automatically adjust brightness based on the ambient light levels, but that isn't always enough.
It's particularly irritating when you want to dim the TV screen, like when you're watching something late at night with the lights out or when you just want the screen to be easy on your eyes (an important requirement in this day and age in which people use electronic displays all day long). A dimmer screen reduces power consumption as well, which should be reason enough for easily accessible brightness control at a time when every corporation makes a huge deal about being eco-friendly (Samsung's remote comes with solar charging!).
The closest you can get is to customize the brightness in a particular picture mode and then cycle to that picture mode when you want to brighten up the screen or turn the brightness down, as most TVs do allow you to quickly cycle through the various picture modes. But that's not a perfect solution, and frankly, we shouldn't have to jump through hoops for something so simple.
The best solution is to have dedicated buttons on the TV remote, even if that might somewhat increase the cost of the remote. Again, Samsung isn't the only television maker that makes adjusting brightness harder than it has to be, but I'm hoping it can take charge and be among the first to address this unnecessary limitation.
