99.9% of the audience will strain to see what is going on, but let's blame their screen buying acumen (and their viewing practices - even the best screen will not make those scenes easily watchable in a sunny room, which is how most people watch TV) instead of making them actually watchable.

What part of “seems like a problem for the producers of bad screens to solve” makes it seem like this is blaming the people who buy the screens and not the people that make the screens.

Don’t make the art worse, hold the manufacturers accountable for selling terrible products.

Art is worse though. From intangible sludge https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-d... to modern DPs and directors not being able to film a dark scene competently https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1564633641828884483

James Stephanie Sterling did a video a long time ago (which I currently cannot find) about "the best game for your HD TV" and concluded (IIRC) that it was Viva Pinata because of the ludicrous colourfulness of the game which really showed off the power of HD TVs. Contrasted with the "intangible sludge" of the Dooms, Quakes, etc.

Now I have the urge to play that and Guacamele will n myy brand new OLED :)

> colors, what happened to them?

Did movies and TV copy video games' Real Is Brown trope?

Color is going away from too many things. Also cars... and for some reason, Taco Bells.

> Don’t make the art worse, hold the manufacturers accountable for selling terrible products.

A big part of this is the viewing conditions. The best screen in the world will not make a dark scene watchable in a bright sunny room. And lots of people watch TV in bright sunny rooms.

Also, better screens = more money. A lot of the time, people just bought a cheap screen, and they would still like to know what happens in the series or movies they watch.

I am absolutely for quality interesting dark scenes in cinema, where both the screen and viewing conditions are normalized. But TV is not the same (and HBO and Netflix are TV).

The screens and sound setups are fine. The movies are bad products here.

Dark scenes tend to look better on bad TVs because they tend to brighten everything too much with LCD bloom. I feel like it's an opposite problem with OLEDs, they're the one with scenes that are too dark.

On good TVs under perfect lighting conditions only.

Try watching handmaid's tale without blackout blinds.

Good, sounds like we agree that the problem is the way they’re displayed, not the way they’re mastered.

If you want to watch a dark scene in bright light then you should have a button on your display/remote that adjusts the settings to make that possible. Tons of people have produced brightened versions of those scenes and put them on YouTube, it’s definitely possible. You can always remove dynamic range in post, hard to create it if the source material doesn’t have it though.

You should not need to adjust anything, volume or brightness, in the middle of episodes/movies.

These scenes are poorly edited. I should not have to live-edit them with my remote while watching. I'll do a poor job, and it takes me out of the experience.

These edits don't "take advantage of" dynamic range; they abuse it.

By "good TV" do you mean one that is stuck in demo mode with blown out saturation and gamma?

Of course not, that would look awful.

You're 100% correct and also brave for saying it out loud on the internet. Prepare for gnashing of teeth from people with subpar picture quality.