Poor picture quality with dark scenes on OLED

voripteth

SatelliteGuys Pro
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Oct 20, 2005
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Aurora, IL
I was using a Hopper 3 to watch the latest episode of WestWorld on my LG OLED television and was very disappointed with the impossible to ignore compression artifacts on dark scenes. The huge black/gray blobs on the screen were very distracting. Is there anything that I can do about this other than buying the episodes on Amazon and streaming them from there?
 
I was using a Hopper 3 to watch the latest episode of WestWorld on my LG OLED television and was very disappointed with the impossible to ignore compression artifacts on dark scenes. The huge black/gray blobs on the screen were very distracting. Is there anything that I can do about this other than buying the episodes on Amazon and streaming them from there?

I’m assuming you have the H3 set to output the highest resolution?
 
Is there anything that I can do about this other than buying the episodes on Amazon and streaming them from there?

No, that's just how they're encoded and broadcast. HBO Now itself doesn't look much better either but it's not an HBO specific issue - dark scenes in general on Dish don't look great because they're bit starved. I am also on an LG OLED.
 
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No, that's just how they're encoded and broadcast. HBO Now itself doesn't look much better either but it's not an HBO specific issue - dark scenes in general on Dish don't look great because they're bit starved. I am also on an LG OLED.
Am I understanding you correctly that this image quality has the same problem when viewing HBO using Amazon?
Disappointing. :(

Is there any hope of improving this by raising the quality issue with Dish?
(Dark scenes in general as you mentioned.)
 
Am I understanding you correctly that this image quality has the same problem when viewing HBO using Amazon?
Disappointing. :(

I couldn't say for certain with HBO shows via Amazon, I just have experience with the HBO streaming apps where things don't look any better.

Is there any hope of improving this by raising the quality issue with Dish?
(Dark scenes in general as you mentioned.)

No.
 
You will need to adjust your tv to minimize any compression in your video. For instance Marvel Agents of Shield on the Houston ABC station. I tried to adjust it to turn the brightness down to 45 and the contrast down to 75 and back lighting down to 25 to make the back grounds a little more darker and uniform. Also turned the sharpness down to about 5 . Now these are for my 4k Phillips tv with HDR. It didn't work and I still saw jagged compression. So I switched to the OTA version of my ABC station and it worked. The picture immediately improved because there was little to no compression from the ota station. These settings work well for most all of my satellite watching except on the over compressed satellite locals on certain shows. HBO shows look great on my tv. You might have to experiment with different picture controls to minimize back ground compression and jagged lines that you see when the back light and brightness and sharpness is turned up to high.
 
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I was using a Hopper 3 to watch the latest episode of WestWorld on my LG OLED television and was very disappointed with the impossible to ignore compression artifacts on dark scenes. The huge black/gray blobs on the screen were very distracting. Is there anything that I can do about this other than buying the episodes on Amazon and streaming them from there?
Can't say for sure as I don't watch this show, but you are much more likely to get better PQ through Amazon or another streaming service. As you said, compression on Dish sucks but it's reality as most people do not care or notice.

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk
 
This set provides an absolutely stellar performance when streaming Amazon or Netflix from the TV apps. The black blobs are certainly a problem with either HBO or Dish compressing the image heavily. It probably wasn't seen as an issue until OLED became popular since most other TVs cannot reproduce so many different shades of black.

If you stream HBO from Amazon using the in-set app, please reply if there are compression artifacts in dark scenes so we can determine if it is HBO or Dish that are causing the problem.
Thanks!
 
I was using a Hopper 3 to watch the latest episode of WestWorld on my LG OLED television and was very disappointed with the impossible to ignore compression artifacts on dark scenes. The huge black/gray blobs on the screen were very distracting. Is there anything that I can do about this other than buying the episodes on Amazon and streaming them from there?
Watch via HBO GO and see how it looks (or On Demand). Certainly no need to go buying episodes, provided you are an HBO sub. And yes, I know there is no HBO GO app on the OLED, that's what Rokus are for!
 
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You could also download or stream the episodes from the Dish VOD by browsing to the VOD and HBO and episodes should be ready for download or streaming within a day or two of first broadcast, at least the quick turn around was when I was subbed to HBO. I found HBO to have what looked like the entire HBO library and NEW episodes and movies available almost right away. The downloads/streaming from Dish on Demand usually has superior PQ to the live, linear channel.

This is how I used to watch Star Wars Rebels in HD because XD is still in SD, and it is how I watch Younger because TVLand is still in SD, but the On Demand download is in HD and superior PQ to when Younger plays on even an HD channel. At least Dish is not as bad as many say Comcast PQ is.

I have to say that if Dish did not have the HD On Demand downloads for SD premium movie channels or as an alternative to the same content on SD channels, I would be very unhappy. I've learned to leverage the On Demand HD equivalent for SD channels on Dish and it has made all the difference in the world. Dish sent some matter in the mail stating that they were going to get even MORE content for VOD.
 
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