Hi everybody, apologies in advance for the long post. I’ve just had a 65” XG95 delivered yesterday & I’m having some issues with it that I haven’t seen pointed out in reviews, so I’m just wondering if it’s a faulty set, if my settings are incorrect, if the signal for the content is bad or if I’m just expecting too much, hopefully it’s not that.
The first thing I noticed was skin in HD content doesn’t seem particularly defined, I always remember when I bought my first HD TV just over a decade ago, I was amazed at the texture of skin which you just never paid attention to on old sets, pores were obvious whereas before, they weren’t. So the first thing I noticed on this set was, unspectacular skin detail, ok it was just a quiz show, so I switched to one of the sky movie channels (sky Q, not 4K just HD) & Godzilla was on, it was a dark scene & I thought I saw horizontal bars all throughout the image, nothing was particularly well defined & colours were muddy with poor gradation/ banding.
So I googled best settings & set it up as recommended on rtings.com but it didn’t seem much better. I then remembered how bad SD content looked on my old HD tv when I got that & thought maybe that was just the way HD stuff was going to look now, but since most content is still just HD I hoped not, reviews didn’t seems to indicate that & my parents Samsung Q70 didn’t seem to have this problem. As far as I can tell this set should be good at upscaling anyway.
Then I tried Disney+ (Using the native app) knowing I would find 4K content, I watched a few minutes of Captain Marvel & it looked pretty good, I wasn’t blown away, but I didn’t see faults. Today I realised I still hadn’t tried any HD content that you would really expect to look good, so I tried Game of Thrones on sky again, this time during a dark scene the banding/ gradation of colours was really bad, there was a red tree in the background & it was really just a few splodges of different shades of red, I paused it to make sure I wasn’t being over critical but it was definitely not great & the horizontal lines were all through the display again.
I’ve since tried Our Planet on Netflix (not 4K) both through sky & on the native app, thinking that would test it out with brighter colours & the foliage again either looked to be full of digital artifacts or have poor gradation of colour, not during close ups but anything off in the distance or in wide shots. I’m not expecting to see individual leaves from spectacular distances, but it just didn’t look right.
Finally I tried Disney+ again but this time during the opening of Infinity War there was clear banding in a close up of thanos’s armour where it was supposed to be in shadow.
So I don’t know what to think, the only thing I haven’t tried is a Blu-ray (that’ll only be standard HD, no 4K player yet) so I’m kind of wondering if it could be the signal through the satellite dish or the WiFi, but I don’t see why they would be an issue, but equally I don’t understand how the TV could be at fault, everything I’ve read & watched online said to be aware of off centre viewing, blooming & reflections, but non of that is bothering me.
I’ve attached a couple of pics anyway, they look worse than it actually does, but it doesn’t look good