Video settings - how modern tech fails us ...

[Jethro_uk]

Interesting story here:

TL;DR is that modern TV sets seem to default to "action" setting which while great for sports makes films look cheap.

Surely the most obvious solution is some sort of simple industry standard format that carries one byte in a header somewhere declaring what the following material is: sport, film, whatever.

If the TV can detect it, it can be set to autoadjust. If not. Well, that's where we are now.

Where's my $1,000,000 ?

I look forward to seeing how many different shades of wrong I am ...

[alan_m]

You shouldn't take any notice of what film makers say about formats. They change every couple of years.

They should be more worried about the content of the film rather than some arty farty way of displaying it.

IMO most of the settings on a modern TV should be turned off or toned way down. A lot of the motion interpolation possibly only stand a chance of working if the TV broadcasters don't over compress the content or, as on many of the lesser channels, heavily low pass filter before transmission.

[Graham.]

It's often said that the factory settings give an over-saturated, over-contrasted, over-everything-else picture, intended to impress the uninitiated public in a brightly lit showroom.

Also have you noticed that the demo DVDs they show are animations with no reference to the natural world?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Quite. With Samsung being one of the worst, out of the box.

[Adrian Caspersz]

Also that LED backlight is typically set to 100%, and that being somewhat brighter than strictly necessary, will cause another non-sensible disposal on the waste tip before the age of obsolescence.

Also, film is generally a 24 frames a second thing, and that looks horrible on faster screens that are our TVs and computer displays. Hence the smoothing, artificial reality engine etc...

In the US, I think they have to do a bit more of a 'pulldown' bodge to show it steadily on their 60Hz based systems, than we do here at 50. And then they have had their NTSC choice of Disney 'colors' instilled in them from birth.

Tom's comments are probably more justified his side of the pond, where users have less clues on settings in instruction books than we do.