Andor is shot beautifully but it has a major issue that has plagued an increasing amount of shows recently. It is way too dark. The creators knew it was going straight to streaming and was never shown in theaters. I can’t watch the show in the daytime because even with my blinds down and curtains drawn the window in my living room washes out half of the scenes. Some very important things happened in the dark (it being a spy/espionage show), and I felt like I was blind. The script was not written to be an audio drama, it relies on visuals that I literally couldn’t see half the time.
Directors shooting something for streaming: please watch your show on a laptop or cheaper TV in a realistic bedroom or living room setting (with daylight leaking in or with some lights turned on). We don’t all have reference grade monitors and a pitch black studio. In fact, most consumers don’t have those things. If you really want to keep the cinematic purity, could you at least make a “normie edit” that pumps up the brightness?
I finished season 2 yesterday and was actually thinking how refreshing it was that andor WASNT too dark. It has some dark scenes sure but I really it’s not nearly as bad as most shows these days
I think it depends. For me on a fairly recent OLED, watching from the Disney app in AppleTV it looked pretty spectacular during day and night. I do know _some_ shows are terrible but Andor was totally legible to me. I'm not saying you did not have this problem, just that it's not as bad as in some other shows and personally I could not notice it.
I had the opposite opinion of Andor's cinematography. On a nice OLED, everything looked so gray and flat because most scenes were devoid of true dark blacks or bright whites or vivid colors; like every detail on every scene had to be softly uniformly lit so it could be seen. All the beautiful shot composition was defeated by the color grading and lighting that just screamed that it was targeted towards lower common denominator streaming quality screens and not theaters.
Whole time I thought there was really no point watching on an OLED or in HDR cause it's not taking advantage of either.
You can even see it on the photos in the article. The BTS photographs have contrast and blacks while the stills from the show are muted and gray.
The whole series basically looked like it was trying to recreate the "Shot on Google Pixel" look and completely opposite of HBO's black on black on black.
you might have misconfigured HDR in your viewing setup, even if you don't have an HDR display.
a lot of video players don't get it right consistently codec-to-codec, even the gold standard FOSS classics (VLC, MPV) and wrappers like iina on mac.
i typically use iina and vlc as fallback, but wasn't able to get either to play correctly, even though they're fine players for some other examples. i wound up subbing to disney plus for a month to watch it properly.
if you're viewing MKVs of unknown provenance, use an HDR version to ensure it's not a bad encode. if you're not viewing on an HDR display, double-check that tone mapping is enabled and configured correctly.
Directors shooting something for streaming: please watch your show on a laptop or cheaper TV in a realistic bedroom or living room setting (with daylight leaking in or with some lights turned on). We don’t all have reference grade monitors and a pitch black studio. In fact, most consumers don’t have those things. If you really want to keep the cinematic purity, could you at least make a “normie edit” that pumps up the brightness?