Last Sunday Kevin and I watched the big battle on Game of Thrones — the huge battle against the undead that they’ve been building to since season 1. We watched it on our new loveseat and our 50″ HDTV. The experience was pretty disappointing that night. I say “that night” because Game of Thrones totally redeemed itself last night when we re-watched it on a different HDTV — one that has 4K & HDR!

Our 50″ TV is 1080p with no HDR, but I thought it would be fine, it always was in the past. But this episode was just horrible on it. Literally every scene was extremely dim, almost unwatchable. We thought that might have been intentional, so we stuck it out, turning off all the lights in the room and desperately trying to see who was who and what was happening throughout the entire episode. Howard Stern even complained quite a bit on his show, saying how dark it was and that the director should have been fired for such a horrible episode no one could even see. I guess Howard doesn’t have HDR either, and if HE has the problem, I’m sure millions of others had the same experience.

So last night I decided to re-watch the episode on our TV that has 4K HDR. WOW. What a difference! I even found that turning off the HDR+, which I thought would be BETTER for this episode, had the exact opposite effect: It made the screen even brighter and clearer with the “Plus” turned off. So just standard HDR provided excellent lighting in pretty much every scene, even those that were obviously intended to be very dark. It seemed like a totally different episode. I actually saw the dead this time, all of the dragons and battle details, saw who died and who survived and understood much more of what happened. It was quite satisfying, and a great experience this time. Enough so that now I really want to replace our old TV, and won’t be satisfied until I do.

Let there be light… And HDR.