My experience watching a movie with non A/V people...

[singhcr]

I visited some old college friends for the first time since COVID. In general I tend to avoid watching movies at other people's houses unless I know them to have some standards as the experiences are so bad, but as I hadn't seen them in years and it was part of the weekend visit up to see my friend's new cabin along with his wife and baby it would be rude.

So they literally had just bought a brand new 4K Samsung LCD TV. The wife was setting it up with a Blu-ray player. Sneaky me was trying to offer to set it up to disable all the shit that's turned on by default but the wife was having none of it.

So my friends who are mostly PhD's in engineering brought a bunch of DVDs and a handful of Blu-rays. I could see Labyrinth for the first time on DVD (ugh) and I eventually suggested a title I hadn't seen that I wouldn't be too sad if it was messed up, which was Yes Man with Jim Carrey on DVD.

My friend's wife was not at all receptive to any feedback about setting up the TV they literally just bought and the whole movie had the motion smoothing on, along with some stupid auto brightness feature which meant even in a dark room it was really dim. When the TV booted up it wanted some "brightness IQ" setting that "adjusts to the environment" which I suggested she turn off but she said "no I want it to be darker when the room is dark" and just would not listen to any suggestions, a perfect example of someone being confident without having any knowledge whatsoever. She admitted she had no knowledge but just wanted to "leave it alone" as she would somehow make it worse, and even afterwards when she was flipping through the settings she and others again said something to the effect of "who can figure out what to do here, just leave it alone before you make it worse" knowing that I'm a film and A/V guy who knows a lot and puts a lot of time, attention, and care into my setup.

When the trailers started playing, they were stretched from 4x3 letterbox to 16x9 and I cringed. Nobody says anything, nobody notices. Then the movie starts and is 16x9 enhanced, thank God. That was the only thing good.

With that dynamic brightness came motion interpolation and DNR by default as they hadn't touched any of the settings because they were afraid of messing something up. So the whole thing just looked like some weird melted video that wasn't at all real, kept speeding up and slowing down and was all blurry with this dull haze over the whole image due to the lack of brightness. The motion smoothing also had an effect like a fake 3D look where say a car or a person looked like a cardboard cutout relative to the background, it was just soooo bad. That's apparently what a brand new Samsung 4K LCD TV is set to do right out of the box. I just sucked it up for the friendship but I never want to do that again, it was an even worse experience than I thought.

I simply cannot believe how bad that intrapolation was along with the DNR and haze. I'd never seen a whole movie that way as I can't stand to see that fast/slow shit for more than a second or two. Nobody, absolutely nobody made any comment on the worst, farthest from looking like film experience I had ever seen. We're all engineers, fine detail people. As a mechanical engineer I want to know how everything works from A/V to calibration standards, what settings do on TVs, etc etc. Apparently that does not extend to the A/V world for the rest of my friends.

As soon as it started I cringed, and I genuinely tried to get used to it. After 5-10 minutes I physically was getting annoyed and tense about it because it was so so so bad. You get used to it for a few minutes and kind of get into the story but that shit is something I simply could never adjust to. I was just thinking to myself "This isn't like just comparing OLED to LCD in terms of blacks, how can anyone possibly think a movie is supposed to look like this?"

Hell, even a YT rip of a movie I could adjust to eventually but the combination of all of those factors was just too much.

The bar for what the average person watches is so much lower than even I thought. The sacrifices I make for my friends! Remind me not to go to a movie night....