House Of The Dragons UHD

[Fidel+59]

Sky UHD is an expensive joke. 

[Fidel+59]

I have the 1st episode in UHD but the rest in HD. 

[VenatorMeam]

I'd argue that this solution would destroy colour accuracy everywhere else in the image but hell. With how compressed sky's streams are you would never get anything approaching accurate colour anyway.

Grey blacks and grey whites abound.

And let's not even get started on the compression artifacts in anything even approaching a dark scene.

Using standard UHD (the fact that they call it that with the level of quality they put out is also incredibly misleading) does at least make some of the black levels slightly better but its still poor.

[Chodley]

I don't have these image quality issues with my panny oled. I mean it's not as good as a UHD bluray and netflix and prime are usually a bit better but Disney+ isn't. I can definitey tell when it's grabbed the HD version off series link and I've started that by mistake.

[CardiffMan1992]

@Chodley 

That's good to hear hoping it looks fairly decent on my LG OLED tomorrow 

[VenatorMeam]

Are you using the built in TV apps, or watching via the Sky puck itself?

I tried watching the Witcher on netflix on the puck and noticed a lot of artifacting that only occured on the puck and no other version of the app. Maybe the puck itself is simply not capable of putting out a high quality video signal? 

Not looked at anything else but certainly the native tv app/android tv/any other version of Netflix and prime and Disney+ give VASTLY better picture quality then even SKY's "UHD" streams.

I mean hell compare House of the Dragon or even another show I saw recently on SKY called Domina to just about any other show on any other app. 

Disneys and Netflix 1080p streams blow sky's UHD out of the water.

[Fidel+59]

I watch from the sky apps. I agree that the UHD on Sky is poor in comparison to other platforms. IPlayer Disney etc.  

[Chodley]

@Fidel+59 You have to manually pick from "other formats" to get the rest in UHD

[FJRBL]

The UHD HDR presentation by Sky this week was absolutely shocking.

Granted, it was a particularly dark episode, but the HLG/compression presented by Sky was simply unforgivable.

Other broadcasters (BBC) manage HLG without incident on similarly dark material. 

I downloaded a HDR stream from HBO which was far far superior - and the same size - circa 8gb.

Why can't Sky, which continually references its technical prowess and progress, get its act together over what is essentially its premiere drama for the year?

Not good enough. Not good enough at all. 

[TimmyBGood]

---

@FJRBL wrote:

The UHD HDR presentation by Sky this week was absolutely shocking.

---

Spoiler

https://www.vulture.com/article/why-house-of-the-dragon-episode-7-driftmark-was-so-dark.html

 Note: contains spoilers right from the start!

[CardiffMan1992]

@TimmyBGood 

I don't want to spoil as still catching back up but i'm guessing it was intended to be that way like Season 8 Episode 3 was on Game of Thrones?

[TimmyBGood]

@CardiffMan1992 

The HBO Twitter feed said " The dimmed lighting of this scene was an intentional creative decision "

However, as with S8E3, when a 'creative decision' runs into subsequent distributor reprocessing/compression and lands on average £500 televisions rather than £10K broadcast reference monitors, the results can be, um, messy...

[CardiffMan1992]

@TimmyBGood 

Yeah makes sense S8E3 looks quite good on UHD Blu-Ray [PS5 so no Dolby Vision so not true best quality] with my OLED but most won't have seen it look like that so I understood the reactions at the time as most will have seen it in Full HD no HDR and even now with this episode many won't have a good TV for HDR content as while there is a lot that can most can't do well it's a shame really.

[fizzdisco]

I just had a quick look at this episode on the less compressed HBO Max stream and even in Dolby Vision on an OLED it's still ludicrously dark. 

Bad use of day-for-night filming. They've over-compensated in the grade. 

[FJRBL]

Timmy,

I'm aware of all of this - I'm not questioning the creators' choices with regard to direction, lighting, cinematography etc.

Much like GOT 'The Long Night', a properly calibrated quality TV in good surroundings will reveal much detail that cant be seen on a cheaper TV or phone.

My complaint is with the quality provided by SKY and SKY alone - it is not good enough, and frankly inexcuseable.