LG update “fixes” raised blacks on Dolby Vision, but...

CMG00

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...it’s still not black.

Ok, I have a 55” LG OLED B7 paired with a Sony UBP X-700 UHD Blu-ray player. On the 3 picture modes for the input (SDR, HDR, DV) I have the most ideal settings I can get; isf picture modes, all processing off, comfortable OLED light level for viewing, brightness and contrast set correctly as well as a gamma of 2.2 (only adjustable in SDR). I’m watching in virtually a pitch black room.

SDR content looks about as fine as it will get without a professional calibration of the white balance and colour.

With HDR content there were some issues with areas which should have been darker appearing a little light. Black was black, but sometimes there would be black frames between the opening credits and the movie (I noticed on the GOTG2 and Lego Batman UHDs) where they were a little lighter than the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Something similar happened in the La La Land UHD where towards the end of the second scene there was some hideous grey banding, some of which also included parts of the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen “flicking” grey for fractions of a second. I could eradicate these by lowering brightness to 49, but at he detriment of crushing the blacks and causing banding elsewhere.

Based on advice from Blu-ray.com, I decided to play the 4k UHDs through “forced Dolby Vision” on the UHD player. It looked better, and most of the problems like weird grey banding and posterisation were fixed when at the default settings (image profile was Cinema (user) and processing was turned off). However, Black wasn’t exactly black. In most content it did look black, but whenever there was nothing but black on the screen, like in the first few seconds of the film, or in between scenes where there was a cut to black, I could faintly make out that the whole screen was a very faint sort of dirty grey (not just the widescreen frame like in some HDR content). It wasn’t immediately obvious but after a few seconds of letting my eyes adjust it did become pretty clear. In the opening minutes of Blade Runner 2049 I could faintly make out the 16:9 screen, even when there was the opening text to contrast with it. This was reduced by lowering brightness by 1, or alternatively lowering each RGB value by 4 on the “low” 2-point white balance adjustment, where this made black “black” again (although sometimes I could swear it was still very faintly grey). But again this was to the detriment of the image as it created black crush, especially noticeable on darker hair, like the New York sanctum scene in the Infinity War 4k.

I know that there were much worse issues with raised blacks on Dolby vision content through HDMI on LG OLEDs before, but I read that the June update (which I updated on my TV when I set it up two weeks ago) solved all these problems. But since black on SDR and HDR is most definitely black, but on DV it isn’t, did this update simply reduce the effect so much that most people wouldn’t notice?
 

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