Pelican Parts Forums - TV series so dark I can't see ?

Quote:

Originally Posted by David Inc. (Post 11729255)

A lot of modern TVs are backlit and have pretty poor black levels so that the contrast between the scene and the darkness is nearly impossible to discern--everything just turns to a mush of soft gray.

The one that comes to mind immediately was one of the last battles in Game of Thrones that took place at night. I watched it at home on an old plasma (perfect black levels) and it looked absolutely beautiful and perfect, but then the twitter-verse blew up about how nobody could see the fighting because it was so dark. I watched it again on an LCD TV we had at the time and yeah, it looked like absolute ****.

When we bought a new TV with plasma not being an option we made sure to get something with localized LED backlights so that the black levels could be comparable. It makes a big difference.

Ya I agree. If the kids can't see either then this sounds like a display or config issue. I really doubt its a content issue.

There's a bunch of tvs have terrible contrast and the "HDR" defaults turn the darks into mud. Fundamentally the content is coded in a way that the cheap tvs will render badly.

There's physical rendering standards pushed by zealots that marketing encourages tvs to follow. The tvs all do it because the logos look good on the box, but at those settings some displays can't render well, result is that correct rendering to the spec ends up looking like mud.

There are also some displays and renderers that get confused when talking to each other and result can be that dark scenes are too dark. For a long time sony had a unique perspective on dark levels so their content often won't play well on other displays. It meets the spec but plays badly on non-sony screens - thats sony for you.

Even with the crappiest lcd tv there are advanced settings to control the gamma and disable 'deep color' and 'hdr' so the dark scenes can stay within the tvs capabilities. If you do this the dark scenes still won't look awesome on a bad tv but for that you just need a better tv. The tvs all have support to 'render well to the screens ability' but its often off by default and difficult to enable, and it might look weird in a head to head at the store.

I've got an old plasma at home, one of the final panasonics from 2013. Predates support for HDR and Deep Color. It has been pretty great. I'm waiting for the oled price to come down but afraid I might not be able to get one small enough to fit where I want it to go.