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 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.
I was playing around with my TV settings last night, coincidentally due to a game losing detail for being too bright but its the same problem.
Rather than changing the brightness directly, I instead changed the “display mode”. The options are like, “dynamic, cool, neutral, standard, theatre” etc.
I had dynamic selected which on normal scenes (not too dark or bright) it looked really good, but made dark scenes difficult to see and lost details where its too bright.
Setting it back to “neutral” or similar made a huge difference. It did make the normal scenes appear a little washed out but I’m already used to it and can now see what I was missing before.
I think the dynamic mode was blowing out the contrast like crazy
Yeah, that is my problem. I have calibrated my new TV to meet optimal color and light levels - and it looks absolutely great in like 96% of all I’ve thrown at it.
But watching See last night was a nightmare. And I know AppleTV+ can look good, as I just finished watching Silo, and even though that by design is also a quite dark show, I never lost sight of what was going on.
I guess there’s not much to do other than turn up the brightness. Which shouldn’t be necessary. But alas, the world is not perfect.
A better TV/monitor, rarely is the scene actually too dark.
In addition to what others have said about tv settings, it also seems that a lot of filmmakers have forgotten how to light a scene. They go for really crushed blacks, but don’t bother with backlights (to separate the characters from the background) or making sure enough light is on the face and eyes. The result being just a really poorly exposed image.
I hate it… I don’t know if it’s because they made shows thinking it will be seen on a perfect screen, or because they think it’s “realistic”, but it makes lots of things unwatchable.
If you watch the Daredevil serie from 2015, most of the action scenes take place at night or in dark rooms (since main character is blind), but you can still perfectly understand what is happening.
There is really no need to make the person watching feel like they are blind too…