UHD Dark Picture

[Johnny96]

I’m in the UK and I have a Sony KD-49XD8305. I have Sky Stream and when I watch in UHD the picture is quite dark. I can see that there is potentially a really good picture there but it’s just dark. The brightness and contrast are both at max.

I went into an electrical retailer and spoke with a Sony Expert who advised a soft reset which I have done and it made no difference, he also said I could try a factory reset and see if that made any difference, however when I tried that I got to  factory data reset, pressed select and absolutely nothing happened.

I would appreciate any help that anyone could offer to try and get the UHD picture brighter. I may add that when I watch in HD the picture quality is really quite good.

Thanks in advance.

[LightFoot]

Hi @Johnny96   I am not familiar with Sky Stream but with Sky Q you need to set the format to 2160p 8 bit. With 10 bit the signal may include HDR and if the TV does not recognise it, it will not switch on HDR and the result is a dark screen.

[graygerman]

Have you got all the settings configured, UHD Good Qual hdmi cables and the HDMI port set to 4k etc, dont think a reset would make a difference, as other post said, itll be a setting so id start by checking the hdmi port setting to make sure its all set right.

[Johnny96]

Hi, the stream puck is connected to hdmi 2. I have just spoken to Sky who went through a factory reset on their equipment which has improved the picture quality.

[royabrown2]

@Johnny96 

I have my LG TV set to Vivid, and going from HD to UHD/HDR for Wimbledon on the BBC iPlayer, the picture dulled down. Looking at the Picture settings, I saw it had changed from Vivid to Standard, though the rest of the picture settings hadn’t changed.

Setting Vivid stopped the picture being dull; and after this, that setting was retained by the TV when I next swapped to and from UHD/HDR.

It’s worth looking to see if your Sony TV is doing something similar.

[Johnny96]

Hi @best_iptv thanks for your help and suggestions. I have tried everything that you have suggested.

I carried out a factory reset on my tv and also contacted Sky and with their help I done a factory reset on the sky stream puck. Unfortunately it didn’t make any difference to the content that’s coming directly from Sky.

I have two stream pucks which I swapped over just to see if it was the puck that was faulty but that didn’t make any difference either. All the settings are as they should be on both the tv and the puck.

If I watch BBC iPlayer UHD (David Attenborough, mammals) through the sky stream puck the picture quality is extremely good and what you would expect from UHD, however if I watch Sky Sports UHD you can clearly see there is a good quality picture there but it’s just really dull, it almost looks like there is a piece of clear film on the screen that you get with new TV’s that needs removed to expose the clarity of picture that you would expect from UHD.

I would suspect that the issue may lie with the age of my tv (2016 model I think) and it’s not able to upscale the content being broadcast by Sky which is HLG if I’m not mistaken, don’t know if that makes any difference or not.

It may be the case that I may need to upgrade my TV to a more up to date model to experience the full benefit of the Sky Ultra HD/Dolby Atmos offering.

I have been looking at maybe getting the Sony Bravia XR-50X90SU 50” Full Array LED with Dolby Atmos. I don’t know too much about the technology with TV’s and wondered if you could shed some light on the benefits of full array and the quality of the Atmos delivery with particular TV. The TV wouldn’t be in a large room and I wondered if the Dolby Atmos coming direct from the TV would be sufficient without having to look at getting a sound bar.

Apologies for the long reply, I hope you are able to offer some advice. Thanks in advance.

[EMS_MO72]

Hey @Johnny96 

I believe getting a new TV that supports Dolby Vision, will highly affect the viewing experience, especially the UHD channels.