cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Anonymous User
Not applicable

Quality of HD

Hello I wanted to discuss the quality of the HD content of the films. I haver noticed that the black levels on a lot of the films, is poor and more a mucky grey and its the same on most of the content, don't get me wrong if its a normal day kind of day picture then its acceptable.

I have the advantage of repairing a great deal of TV's and I have tried this on various OLED QLED and normal LED Tv's in the workshop and always seem to get the same result. When comparing to other online providers you can even see a clear difference in the picture quality between these and have to say NOWTV is the worse. Strangely if you watch the same program through a SKY Q box in the same format the picture quality is on this is system is far better and richer with perfect black levels.

 

Interesting to hear other people's views. 

2 REPLIES 2
schnapps
Legend 5
Legend 5

Hi @Anonymous User 

 

That's an interesting observation, i won't be much help on checking this myself where my four TV's in the house (two old plasmas with low contrast ratios plus two mid range 4K Led / LCD TV's that doesn't offer black levels close to an OLED).

 

I do watch a lot of NowTV movies with the HD Boost pass, but because of the limitations of my TV black levels i use bias lighting behind the TV's to mask the flaws on their black levels when watching in the dark.

 

Though, i do watch movies on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video as well and haven't noticed much difference personally myself with black levels across the three streaming services on my television sets.

 

NowTV going back a few years ago did have a problem on one of its newly released NowTV branded devices with elevated blacks and the picture was washed out, but this was noticeable immediately even in a day light environment and was fixed with a firmware update within days. 

 

Would love to own an OLED TV to see if your observations and findings are right.

 

Hopefully OLED TV and FALD LCD television owners who have better black levels on their television sets will chip in on here with their thoughts on the subject matter.

Anonymous User
Not applicable

Interesting.

 

I actually experience the same on my 2020 Samsung QLED - naturally, it does offer amazing, deep blacks but when watching some movie content on the entertainment pass, blacks do appear to be a more subtle grey. I think it's definitely better than my 1080p Sony which I replaced. My set doesn't have the FALD so can't comment on that.

 

A lot of newer TVs have image processing enabled by default which automatically adjusts the picture to suit what you're watching, including various picture modes you can apply - FILMMAKER MODE is an interesting one and standard across a lot of sets nowadays where it adjusts the colour, aspect ratio and disables motion smoothing for a more accurate image. I tend to use this when I'm watching movies because it reduces the peak brightness (for dark room viewing)

 

I've seen the same happen on Netflix full HD too, so it could be something related to the way it's compressed perhaps (often some services do this to save bandwidth) which might change the colours slightly.