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Comments (58)

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  kevinlearynet
  All the settings in the world won't change the story.
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  freitasm
  If only the directors didn't make everything so dark and hard to see. Also stopped messing with sound, making it impossible to hear dialogues.
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  ycombinatrix
  The "soap opera" effect is real, I don't enjoy it.
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  avazhi
  Thanks for the thought but from what I’ve heard from friends I’ll be keeping the final season unwatched just like I did with the last 2 episodes of GoT.
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  thrownawaysz
  Implying that makes a bad season better. When you watch thrash settings doesn't really matter
• zzo38computer
  I thought there is such a thing (although probably some TV sets do not have) as "film maker mode" to do it according to the film maker's intention (although I don't know all of the details, so I do even know how well it would work). "Dolby Vision Movie Dark" is something that I had not heard of.(However, modern TV sets are often filled with enough other junk that maybe you will not want all of these things anyways)
• tzs
  My TV is from around 2017 and some of those settings definitely suck on it. I'm curious if they have improved any of them on newer TVs.Here's how bad it was in 2017. One of the earliest things I watched on that TV was "Guardians of the Galaxy" on some expanded basic cable channel. The fight between Peter and Gamora over the orb looked very jerky, like it was only at about 6 fps. I found some reviews of the movie on YouTube that included clips of that fight and it looked great on them, so I know that this wasn't some artistic choice of the director that I just didn't like. Some Googling told me about the motion enhancement settings of the TV, and how they often suck. I had DVRed the movie, and with those settings off the scene looked great when I watched it again.
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  xxdiamondxx
  Probably a good time to plug Filmmaker mode!
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  xnx
  I hope AI tools allow for better fan edits. There's enough of a foundation and source footage to redo the later episodes of Stranger Things ... The Matrix ... etc.
• sholladay
  When people say “creator’s intent”, it sounds like a flavor. Like how food comes out of the kitchen before you put toppings on it to make it your own.But vivid mode (et al) literally loses information. When the TV tries to make everything look vibrant, it’s effectively squishing all of the colors into a smaller color space. You may not be able to even tell two distinct objects apart because everything is similarly bright and vibrant.Same with audio. The famous “smile” EQ can cause some instruments to disappear, such as woodwinds.At the end of the day, media is for enjoyment and much of it is subjective, so fine do what you need to do to be happy. But few people would deliberately choose lower resolution (except maybe for nostalgia), which is what a lot of the fancy settings end up doing.Get a calibration if you can, or use Filmmaker Mode. The latter will make the TV relatively dark, but there’s usually a way to adjust it or copy its settings and then boost the brightness in a Custom mode, which is still a big improvement over default settings from the default mode.
• brador
  My screen, my settings, my experience.
• lawgimenez
  Wow that CGI creature looks bad. I thought it was from the Stranger Things game.
• minimaxir
  Game of Thrones Season 8 was lambasted for having an episode that was mostly in darkness...in 2019.You'd think television production would be calibrated for the median watcher's TV settings by now.
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  api
  Totally agreed. I read somewhere that the only place these features help is sports. They should not be defaults. They make shows and films look like total crap.
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  robomartin
  Yeah, televisions come full of truly destructive settings. I think part of the genesis of this virus is the need for TV's to stand out at the store. Brands and models are displayed side-by-side. The only way to stand out is to push the limits of over-enhancement along every possible axis (resolution, color, motion, etc.).Since consumers are not trained to critically discern image and video quality, the "Wow!" often wins the sale. This easily explains the existence of local dimming solutions (now called miniLED or some other thing). In a super bright Best Buy or Walmart viewing environment they can look fantastic (although, if you know what to look for you can see the issues). When you get that same TV home and watch a movie in the dark...oh man, the halos jump off the screen. Now they are starting to push "RGB miniLED" as if that is going to fix basic optics/physics issues.And don't get me started on horrible implementations of HDR.This is clearly a case of the average consumer not knowing enough (they should not have to be experts, BTW) and effectively getting duped by marketing.
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  kritiko
  This article seems to imply that the default settings are the manufacturer recommended ones for streaming movies - is that bad ux? Should Netflix be able to push recommended settings to your tv?
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  eudamoniac
  The soap opera effect is only a problem because no one is used to it. Higher FPS is objectively better. These motion interpolation settings are now ubiquitous and pretty much nobody cares about said effect anymore, which is great, because maybe now we can start having movies above 24FPS.To preempt replies: ask yourself why 24 frames per second is optimal for cinema instead of just being an ancient spec that everyone got used to.
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  tguvot
  what about not filming entire show in darkness. or, i don't know, filming it in a way that it will look ok on modern televisions without having to turn off settings.
• osakasake
  [dead]
• throwatdem12311
  [dead]
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  sublinear
  I'm not even convinced anyone really watches Stranger Things, so I don't see the point. Seems like something people put on as background noise while they are distracted by their phones.
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  kstrauser
  Yeah, kiss m'ass. I agree that some of those settings do need to be turned off. When I visit someone and see their TV on soap opera mode, I fight the urge to fix it. Not my house, not my TV, not my problem if they like it that way, and yet, wow, is it ever awful.But then getting into recommendations like "turn off vivid mode" is pretty freaking pretentious, in my opinion, like a restaurant where the chef freaks out if you ask for salt. Yes, maybe the entree is perfectly salted, but I prefer more, and I'm the one paying the bill, so calm yourself as I season it to my tastes. Yes, vivid modes do look different than the filmmaker intended, but that also presumes that the viewer's eyes are precisely as sensitive as the director's. What if I need higher contrast to make out what's happening on the screen? Is it OK if I calibrate my TV to my own personal viewing conditions? What if it's not perfectly dark in my house, or I want to watch during the day without closing all the blinds?I tried watching the ending of Game of Thrones without tweaking my TV. I could not physically see what was happening on the screen, other than that a navy blue blob was doing something against a darker grey background, and parts of it seemed to be moving fast if I squinted. I cranked the brightness and contrast for those episodes so that I could actually tell what was going on. It might not have aligned with the director's idea of how I should experience their spectacle, but I can live with that.Note that I’d also roll my eyes at a musician who told me how to set my equalizer. I’ll set it as I see fit for me, in my living room’s own requirements, thanks.