I have to admit that last night's show - Season 8 Episode 3 - was probably one of the more disappointing episodes I've ever seen from this series. What could have been something phenomenal turned into something rather dumbfounding.
I've watched the majority of this show in my home theater on my 100" screen and I cannot recall being disappointed before until last night. Instead of just sitting back and enjoying the episode, I found myself reaching for my projector remote and hastily changing settings to try and get the image to look good. Today I even re-watched the episode on my 65" LG OLED just to confirm my suspicions.
I think the video production crew fell a bit short on this episode. Never mind the director's choice of constant in your face close up shots during one of the most epic night battles ever filmed, but the whole thing seemed too gray when it should have been more black. The black levels on this episode were some of the worst I've ever seen. This was a night battle seen and the bezel on my LG are darker than anything in the episode! To put this in perspective, the crowd at the Dallas Stars/St. Louis Blues game was as dark as my bezel.
So what's really at play here?
First there's the compression. Compression is a fact of life nowadays whether you're streaming, watching via cable or satellite, or even over the air. Everything is compressed. It's a fact of life.
Bandwidth - for us streamers this is another issue but I saw no bandwidth artifacts while watching via HBO Now last night. I just had terrible black levels. Bandwidth and compression artifacts go hand in hand and generally show up as blocky type artifacts or pixelation, image noise, etc.
Finally, there's HBO. You've got Amazon, Netflix and a few other companies out there putting out everything they can get their hands on in 4K and High Dynamic Range. And then you have HBO who struggle to get 1080p SDR correct. It's too bad Netflix couldn't have finished this one off for HBO.
So you combine all of those things and you get what I, and apparently a lot of other people, witnessed last night. A historic episode that took over 55 nights to shoot that fell short. At least the content of the episode itself was excellent. Just sad to see the video fall so far short.