Comment by beloch
8 hours ago
"Duffer’s advice highlights a conflict between technological advances and creators' goals. Features like the ones he mentioned are designed to appeal to casual viewers by making images appear sharper or more colorful, but they alter the original look of the content."
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Settings that make the image look less like how the material is supposed to look are not "advances".
Q: So why do manufacturers create them?
A: They sell TV's.
Assume that every manufacturer out there is equally capable of creating a screen that faithfully reproduces the content to the best ability of current technology. If every manufacturer does just that, then their screens will all look extremely similar.
If your TV looks like everybody else's, how do you get people strolling through an electronics store to say, "Wow! I want that one!"? You add gimmicky settings that make the image look super saturated, bizarrely smooth, free of grain etc.. Settings that make the image look less like the source, but which grab eyes in a store. You make those settings the default too, so that people don't feel ripped off when they take the TV out of the store.
If you take a typical TV set home and don't change the settings from default, you're typically not going to see a very faithful reproduction of the director's vision. You're seeing what somebody thought would make that screen sell well in a store. If you go to the trouble of setting your screen up properly, your initial reaction may be that it looks worse. However, once you get used to it, you'll probably find the resulting image to be more natural, more enjoyable, and easier on the eyes.
>Assume that every manufacturer out there is equally capable of creating a screen that faithfully reproduces the content to the best ability of current technology.
That basically isn’t true. Or rather, there are real engineering tradeoffs required to make an actual consumer good that has to be manufactured and sold at some price. And, especially considering that TVs exist at different price points, there are going to be different tradeoffs made.
Yes, there are tradeoffs, but LCD, etc. technology is now sufficiently good that displays in the same general price category tend to look quite similar once calibrated. The differences are much more noticeable when they're using their default "gimmick" settings, and that's by design.
why even bother with "TV Screens"? Why not just get a big computer monitor instead, like 27" or something
I don't know what kind of a joke you tried here, but I think a vast majority of TV screens can be put in game or PC mode, and all the input lag and stupid picture processing goes away. I run a 43" LG 4K TV as a PC monitor and never have I had a (flat screen) monitor with a faster response rate! My cinema TV is an old FullHD 42" Philips that has laughably bad black levels. I run it also in PC mode but the real beauty of this TV is that without further picture processing it produces nice and cinemalike flat color that is true to the input material that I feed it. Flashy capeshit will be flashy and bright, and a muted period drama will stay muted.