Live UHD broadcasts dark picture?

[daveinni]

Not sure what the issue is here.   I first came across this problem with BBC UHD broadcasts long before I had Sky stream.  It only happens with certain broadcasters and sadly Sky seems to be one of them.  Amazon for example is fine when they show UHD football,  but watching the cricket on Sky in UHD it's like they're playing at dusk,  and turning up Tv settings just makes all look over saturated and awful.  I should add this is only live broadcasts, movies or anything else on demand is totally fine. 

Any idea what the issue is?

[Chrisee]

@daveinni what TV do you have? Sky and the BBC use a type of HDR codec called HLG which some TVs dont handle correctly giving a dark picture as the TV is not recognising that it is getting a HDR feed so not switching the backlight to max. Most HDR TVs made in the last few years do support HLG but some early HDR models dont. 

If your TV does not support HLG properly you are better not watching live UHD sports feeds as there is no SDR copy. The HD programming is in SDR. Sky do offer UHD SDR vesions of titles in the on demand which should work for you.

[daveinni]

I believe it's a hitachi 58hk6100,  yes I see HLG settings in the menu when on sky UHD.  It's an odd sort of a thing.  I'm watching sky sports news now in UHD, the presenter etc all fine, when it goes to some matches or interviews with the coaches it's dark

[Chrisee]

@daveinni Hitachi have not made a TV sold in the UK for many years current models are bought in from OEM makers like Vestel and while good value for money they are not technically brilliant.so this maybe a limitation of your TV. 

If you have to watch normal programming with the backlight close to its maximum then HDR material will tend to look dark. On TVs capable of higher luminace you can watch SDR content with the back light at say 50 so when HDR material switches it to 100 which makes the colour balance correct. 

[RR1995]

If you have a firstick plugged in then change the colour depth on that to 8bit. This fixed the issue for me 🙂