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d21lewis on 30 July 2020
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GrahfsLament said:
d21lewis said:
I've had a 4K Sony Bravia with HDR since like 2017. I thought it looked great.

THEN, I got a 4k Samsung with HDR about a month ago. Didn't expect it to be anything special. Just got it for the living room since I wanted a bigger TV for the family.

The Samsung blew away my Sony.

After that, I've been going into the settings of both and tweaking them and the consoles connected (PS4 Pro and XBO X on the Sony/Standard PS4 and Xbox One on the Samsung). I honestly think the Samsung makes the regular consoles look better than the upgraded consoles. However, I did manage to change settings on the Sony that made my games look spectacular.

Since then, I've been playing and replaying older games and being impressed by what I see on both. And the HDR is nice. I just wonder if it's real. Like I can't see certain colors with HDR turned off but I can't understand why.

In my (albeit limited) experience, one of the strengths of Sony TVs is the level of audio and video customization in the settings if you want to spend the time there, digging through the menus. Most other TVs that I've encountered seem to try to limit how many settings the consumer can tweak. I suppose I fancy myself a sort of "power" user, so I tend toward custom Android roms, Linux, and devices with as many options/toggles/sliders as possible. Typically, automated settings are nice for me only as a starting point. Almost all of my friends, however, are definitely in the "whatever's default, I just want to use the remote for on and off and nothing else" camp. So, everyone's mileage may vary.

As to the bolded part, HDR expands the luminance range, so you're definitely seeing more shades of light and dark. If I recall correctly, the Wide Color Gamut standard is also present in the HDR profiles that the consoles use (it's definitely present in Windows 10 as well), so you would, in fact, be seeing additional colors.

I think the Samsung showed me what a good picture is supposed to be instead of what I thought a good picture was. I wasn't even using "game mode" because "sports mode" seemed to make things look more fluid and pop more. The biggest thing was switching to Game Mode and then enabling certain features in the video settings of the consoles, themselves. 

Thanks for explaining HDR, btw. I never really understood why TVs could display certain things but only if a certain setting was on. Almost like they were purposely holding back something just to give it to us for extra money. But you cleared it up.