I’ve been wrestling with this for a few months, and am still no closer to a solution.
On my TV, some Amazon Prime offerings are very dark to the point of being unwatchable. It’s typically newer TV shows and films, although – weirdly – some of the new stuff is fine.
For example, the Rings of Power looks like it’s been shot in the dark. But Last One Laughing is fine.
This is a known issue, and various solutions have been put forward, such as changing the HDR settings. None of them work.
I even tried contacting Amazon customer service, who were clueless, offering helpful solutions such as increasing the brightness settings on the TV (for info, pumping up the brightness helps a bit, but not to the point that something is watchable).
I have a Sony Bravia TV which is a couple of years old, and there are no issues with content on any of the other streaming platforms.
Any ideas?
I’m afraid I can offer no solutions but I do commiserate. I’ve found switching HDR off helps a little but I’m not fiddling around with my televisions settings to alleviate a problem Amazon should be damn well fixing. Don’t get me started on the difficulties involved in actually browsing the content when looking for something to watch. I very rarely bother watching anything offered up by Amazon anymore out of sheer frustration. Life is too short and other platforms have better content that I can actually watch without peering into the murk.*
* I accept that having cataracts doesn’t help.
Dark lighting and muffled delivery by actors appears to be endemic across all channels.
Putting subtitles on doesn’t always help as the font sizes used are often very small and the type is frequently run over a white background.
There is one streamer – Disney? – who offers various font size and colour options. Shame more don’t follow suit
See also: text messages in drama. If I’m going to be able to read it from the other side of the room, it needs to fill the whole screen, not be postage stamp sized in the middle of the frame.
Actors: take a couple of steps towards the camera, hold the phone up and ask “can you read that?” or, even better, read it out loud.
Silo suffered badly from this (also from the terrible dialogue, acting and pacing but that’s off topic) and there is no reason it should be so.
I’ve no idea why, and like pencilsqueezer I’m not fucking about with the TV settings either.
What annoys me is that Mr Bezos charges me for watching his product, but wants to charge me even more for the privilege of watching it without adverts.
Same as Sky – which charges more and dosen’t deliver me stuff the next day as part of the deal. It’s the new business model – give people a great product, sell it cheap and then start making it worse unless they pay extra to keep it good. YouTube, and theme parks are great examples.
This. I loath adverts and if I can’t avoid them I mute the sound and pick up the phone until they have finished, so adding them to an ad free service I have already paid for massively pees me off. I don’t have Sky but did when I lived in France via a hooky service taking advantage of a dish someone had left in the roof and was shocked not just that there are adverts on a paid service, but by how many there were. Rubbish service even if you can watch endless American Chopper reruns.
The above posters will “enjoy” the first episode of the latest Black Mirror.
I was somewhat shocked recently when I did an informal survey. Mostly I was talking to retirees, stalwart members of the community, politics somewhat to the right of centre.
The majority were using that Amazon fire stick thingie (IPTV?). Almost without exception they said “£70 a year and I can get every channel in the world.”
Is this a Napster moment for TV?
I do it I’m afraid and I’m a bit left of centre (not sure why that’s relevant but hey ho).
Sometimes you have to wait as long as a day for the most recent episode.
The “pay for no adverts” thing was the tipping point.
@retropath2
Beat me to it! It’s called Common People and is both very funny and very, very sad
I’ve experienced this a couple of times. First thought was my connection wasn’t strong enough, but all good there. Did the IT failsafe of turning Prime off and on again, that fixed it.
Looked like it wasn’t my connection, but the speed 8t was being streamed to me. Simple brain says I found a very busy or dodgy Amazon server.
Hmmm, not sure the speed of the stream would affect brightness. If you have problems with that then the picture will keep buffering, breaking up or going blank I would think.
Nah, we’ve just had fibre up the doodah installed and Silo still looks like a group of people in a large cylindrical cavern with stairs, but no proper lighting.
The stream isn’t direct from Apple TV’s servers either (I imagine) so it’s perhaps not your chosen streaming service at fault.
I thought at first you meant that a lot of drama has become bleak and morose, and was about to agree.
We had to get a new telly recently and the picture is still visibly dark, so no suggestions I am afraid.
Thanks everyone. The lack of a solution is annoying, especially when one suspects it’s something that Amazon knows about (there have been many posts on this in recent years on various sites/boards) but can’t be bothered fixing.
But it makes a decision to cancel Amazon Prime much easier.
Thanks Jeff Bezos!