The Game of Thrones Thread (With Spoilers)

The image quality from blue-ray for GOT (also WW) has been reference class, easily running circles around some very big budget movies. The tonal grading is spot on and very little crushed blacks, with excellent detail.
Right from Season 1.

In S8E3 the compression artifacts was extremely obvious. I assume the black levels should be at least on par with the Battle for Black Water, but watching this with my projector setup, it was just pure blocks of flat black on the screen. No depth, no layers. I will have to wait for the blue-ray release before drawing any conclusions if it really is to dark .Considering how excellent all the other seasons have been on the image quality, I doubt they will compromise so much to "hide" their budget, so I am just going to chalk it up to compression artifacts, or something.

I have good feeling about this last three. After all, this show is built around unpredictability...

 

This is a good summary of the last few pages of this thread...

 

Lmao, right on.

 

Truly brilliant, thanks for sharing

 

OLED still can't get past the burn-in issue either, but for purely netflix and movie watching, should be fine. I'm not sure if it'll be ever to get over it as well, because it's a native quality of the tech. MicroLED will probably be the future. OLED, QLED, MLED... too many acronyms.

Good quality LG OLED panels are relatively cheap now compared to other higher end offerings. I'm the type of guy that's rocking a mid-range samsung from 2010 in 2019 though-- 95% of my time is on my computer monitor.

 

If I understand it correctly (and the opposite is a distinct possibility) they're just different names for basically the same tech with minor (the companies themselves would likely say major) implementational differences. I have a very old plasma as well which suits my needs for the moment, but OLED is still the best we have at present.

 

No they're all fundamentally different techs. In reality, QLED is just a regular LCD tv though, it's mostly just marketing on Samsung's behalf, trying to make it sound cool and different like OLED.

So really it's Organic LED vs LCD vs Micro LED.

 

You can get an LG OLED 65" for around 1500 nowadays, maybe cheaper if you do some hunting. Been thinking about upgrading my older LCD.

 

Honestly, this is the best summary of the episode so far. Absolutely spot-on!

The sad truth is that I enjoyed the first two episodes more. Thanks god for Melisandre, she was the only highlight of the battle. Otherwise it just sucked - too dark, too nonsensical.

 

Glad you enjoyed it. I just about soiled myself at about 1:40... "But for real though, Theon and Jorah died..."

 

Gotcha...I remember when it 1st came out, just about every manufacturer had another acronym for their version of OLED...I obviously haven't been keeling up. Thx.

 

Sony is coming out with their expensive 8k tvs soon. The expensive Sony OLED tvs are coming down in price. The new things comes and brings down the price on the old stuff and the cycle repeats. More OLED tvs come out and cheaper alternatives come out and it also pushes the big brands to lower prices.

 

Seems like this thread is now "Game of Monitors" or something.

The LCD's aren't dark and that fills me full of terror...

 

Just buy last years model. You can get a 65" for less then this years 55".

 

That's better

 

Yes, the combination the pros use is pretty expensive for a uni-tasker: about US$1500, IIRC. But with a colorimeter (US$150-350), some free software, a CD/Bluray burner, and $10 blue plastic THX glasses you can get excellent results yourself. But it does take some time to learn how to do it, and you won't be able to write the color LUTs into the TV, just adjust the settings.

I calibrate all my display devices. But I've also had a colorimeter for photography for 15 years. It also calibrates printers, projectors, and cameras so at least it's not a uni-tasker.

 

Yeah if i had use for more devices i might get one. Thing is i only care about the tv which is at least once every 5 years or more so for me getting one is not worth it. Also with the HDR stuff don't you need new calibrators and software?

 

Nope. Most colorimeters can read a broader space of color values than can be represented in screen (transmissive) or printed (reflective) media. The hardware reads absolute reflective and transmissive color values.

The software uses standardized transform functions of those absolute values to map into a color space (gamut of all possible spectrum colors), of which there are many (most people are familiar with sRGB for photos; Rec709 is the older HDTV space, Rec2020 is UHDTV (not HDR), and Rec2100 is for (U)HDTV (HDR)).

The software also takes into account the rendering intent, which is typically one of: absolute colorimetric (stay as close to absolute as possible, but within the gamut), relative colorimetric (relative mapping within the bounds of the color space), perceptual (select a color in the space that seems correct to a viewer, but not necessarily accurate). Those affect the transform function (or parameters for it) chosen for the mapping.

The only time you'd need new hardware would be when the representable color range exceeds the dynamic range of the reader (e.g., if we could suddenly differentiate 64-bits worth of dynamic range of colors, when you have a 32-bit reader).

48-bit color representation is starting to bloom, but is still young. Most people can't discern that level* of color, and even if you can (and your entire video chain supports it), when your source is streamed those colors will have been affected by compression any way.

I think 48-bit color is really like 24- or 32-bit recording equipment: it gives you the headroom to do color grading and manipulation, and archival storage. From a consumer perspective, probably little perceived benefit.

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Just sub'd to HBO•NOW Thursday, and watched all 3 Thursday/Friday nights. Yeah, S8E1 was slow, but it was good for me. After 2 years I was like who the F are these people…I don't remember anything!

Ep3 was definitely dark; the show videographer can say any BS he wants, but he didn't do his job well for that episode. Arya's long been my favorite character, so was happy to see her kick ass.

However, we didn't see any compression artifacts.

If HBO is similar to most, they're "streaming" ~10-second snippets of video at a time, and at each snippet boundary they look at the network characteristics and choose the quality of the next snippet to send. This supports streaming to mobile devices with poor network conditions; they can choose a more or less highly-compressed and higher/lower bitrate stream for the next snippet at each boundary to compensate for network latency and throughput.

Edit: add endnote.

* That's a small color test. You'll only be able to do well on a calibrated monitor. They're designed to score how well a person perceives color.

I got a zero: perfect score. (why is zero perfect?) I've taken that type of test before with 100 colors in a broad band, and got 98 correct, which is supposedly in the 90+ percentile of the general population. Color is important to me because I can perceive those differences.