PSA, this series is a waste.

1) It could have been covered in a single 90 minute movie.

2) It painfully adds more questions without providing answers.

3) It is visually dark, making it difficult to see.

4) My biggest annoyance is the soundtrack, which is pumped full of noise. Wind, waves, mechanical ship engines, and other background. Dialog is frequently quiet whispers.

I suppose the goal was to force attention but it was annoying.

quote:

Originally posted by Fly-Sig:
3) It is visually dark, making it difficult to see.

4) My biggest annoyance is the soundtrack, which is pumped full of noise. Wind, waves, mechanical ship engines, and other background. Dialog is frequently quiet whispers.

Those two sound like issues with your technology, not necessarily the show itself.

For the dark image, this is a common complaint with older and cheaper LCD TVs, like the budget big screen TVs you see on sale for Black Friday or the like. They just suck at properly displaying darker content, and dark images get turned into a muddy mess of indistinguishable light-bleeding gray pixels. Especially if you're trying to watch them with sunlight and all the lights in the house brightening the room and reflecting off the TV screen. Higher end LCD TVs can do better with dark scenes, and OLED TVs are especially amazing at producing crisp dark images. In addition, most newer Netflix shows are also designed to utilize Dolby Vision, which is a HDR technology that could help a bit with the contrast issues, but if you have a cheaper or older TV that doesn't support Dolby Vision you won't be able to benefit from that.

For the soundtrack issues, dialogue getting overwhelmed by sound effects is a recurring complaint on the forum, and yet again I'll point out that modern shows and movies are mixed specifically for multi-channel surround, with a dedicated center dialogue channel and the sound effects coming through their own dedicated side channels. When you try to squeeze all that out of a bare bones basic two-channel (left/right) stereo speaker setup, especially if you're relying on the tiny cheap stereo speakers tacked onto your big screen TV as an afterthought, the dialogue gets muffled amidst the other sound effects because they're all competing for space within the same two channels. And I hate to be the one to say it, but age plays a contributing factor here too... The ability to distinguish dialogue is commonly one of the first things to go when you start dealing with even moderate hearing loss. (I know, because I have the beginnings of hearing loss myself.)


You're going to to continue to run into these two issues with more and more content these days, and the unfortunate truth is that it's not them... it's you. (Or at least your TV setup.) The good news is that turning down/off the lights and closing the blinds to darken your viewing area plus investing in even a basic 3 channel (left/right/center) soundbar will likely go a ways towards lessening these issues, even if you're not yet willing to drop hundreds/thousands on a newer/better TV and full-blown surround sound system.

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:

quote:

Originally posted by Fly-Sig:
3) It is visually dark, making it difficult to see.

4) My biggest annoyance is the soundtrack, which is pumped full of noise. Wind, waves, mechanical ship engines, and other background. Dialog is frequently quiet whispers.

Those two sound like issues with your technology, not necessarily the show itself.

Our tech is up to date and properly configured.

To provide more info, the images frequently contain some normal brightness areas, such as a window or doorway into a different room while the characters are in deep shadows. The audio is pumped full of noise. Not simply sound effects intermittently but constant continuous fatiguing noise. Wind, ships engines, creaking hull, waves hitting the ship.

The whispering dialog is primarily the main female character, though some others do too at times. So the conversation will be normal, then suddenly the quiet whisper at a much lowered volume.

I mention this as it is unusually bad. Much more pronounced than any other show I've watched, with the exception of the darkness of House of Dragons which was at times about as dark.

https://sigforum.com/eve/forum...0601935/m/1850055694

0-0

quote:

Originally posted by Fly-Sig:
I mention this as it is unusually bad. Much more pronounced than any other show I've watched, with the exception of the darkness of House of Dragons which was at times about as dark.

Whereas I had zero problems with House of Dragons being too dark.

I still say it's most likely your setup, not the content.

Everything is a series now. Notice how few films are coming out? A massive chunk of that money moved from to episodic bullshit to try and hook people on their streaming bullshit.

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:

quote:

Originally posted by Fly-Sig:
I mention this as it is unusually bad. Much more pronounced than any other show I've watched, with the exception of the darkness of House of Dragons which was at times about as dark.

Whereas I had zero problems with House of Dragons being too dark.

I still say it's most likely your setup, not the content.

Well of all the shows we've watched on our 2 very modern media setups, 1899 was by far the most poorly done. Both visual and audio.

If intentional, the producers and editors are idiots if only a tiny subset of viewers can get a good presentation. If unintentional, they're incompetent for ruining the experience.

In either case, all viewers who don't have your high level of technology and expertise are likely to find this series difficult to see and hear. That's in addition to it being at least 4 times longer than it needed to be.

Really? The wife and I are liking it.

We have the last episode still to go (so i skipped the replies here in case of spoilers).

I'm liking it but I haven't seen her so engrossed in a show in a long time.

I liked it best at first when the mysteries were developing. The last couple of episodes when the questions were resolved, weren't on par with where I hoped it was leading us, but it was still worth the watch.

Duley Noted