Hey guys and gals!
I was wondering how you feel about - and deal with - really dark tv shows? I’m talking about dark in the context of light emitted, not feelings ;-)
I’m watching See, and while I do appreciate blind people not having a lot of lights turned on at all times, I’m finding it almost unbearable to watch because of how dark it is at times.
I’m having to bump my TV settings up - which is kind of a hassle as I had it really nicely calibrated (damn I love oled by the way) - just to have to turn it back down (and hope to remember those settings) not to get blinded when I watch anything remotely normally illuminated.
I remember this being a topic in the last seasons (or season) of Game of Thrones too - but back then I had an old TV with bad contrast anyway, so I wasn’t hit that hard by it.
How do you feel about too dark tv shows and movies? And how do you deal with it?
I watch at night and turn down the lights in the room to match.
I watch at night and dark scenes look pretty good to me, lots of detail. Also on OLED (LG evo G3), using Filmmaker mode or ‘Cinema’ in case of DV.
Ah, I thought you meant like dark as far as subject matter. For those, I watch them over and over again.
For darkly lit series, I usually just close the blinds and I’m good!
I only watch them at night 😋
I skip them. If the film-makers want me to guess what’s going on on-screen, then I refuse to be their audience.
GoT: what if we do too dark and shaky cam.
For some of those battle scenes I felt nothing because I couldn’t tell who was getting killed
The big thing for me was disabling HDR in all the apps and devices that support doing so.
My 4K and 8K Samsung sets have, apparently, the WORST implementation of HDR possible. Everything looks dark, muddy, and unwatchable. Calibration does nothing.
The only thing that works is turning off HDR in the apps and devices. The television itself doesn’t have the ability to disable it there.
I play with the brightness/contrast/gamma until I can see everything.
It seems like video editors forget that not everyone is using a multi-thousand dollar display specifically tuned for video editing and most people are probably watching whatever on a cheapo Walmart special TV or monitor.
I find “HDR” content on streaming services (Netflix in particular) looks far more crushed than SDR content streamed from my Plex server.
I’m unsure if it’s to do with the bitrate limits of streaming services, but it’s not an issue I’ve run into since switching to Plex a couple years ago.
‘Dolby Vision’ content specifically always looks awful on Netflix, whereas the same content looks fine on the same TV when it’s coming via Plex.
The show Willow, on Disney+, was like this. We had no idea what was going on in several scenes. The emotional tone was dark too. We abandoned the series.
I play with gamma and contrast settings on my device or the contrast and brightness in mphc, or the gamma settings on madVR. I really don’t like leaving settings on auto, but I try to keep it as dark as possible with some detail visible in the shadows, and make sure the bright scenes don’t clip the highlights. Sometimes its a back and forth from scene to scene.
OLED. It’s not much of a problem anymore.
I think it’s way worse on my new oled than it ever was on my old led - it had much lower contrast and nowhere near as dark shadows. Which - again - looks amazing on the vast majority of what I’ve seen on it so far. But especially See on AppleTV+ is almost umwatchable
