Bea Beltran Culture 10.04.2022 02:Oct AM EDT

There is a Reason Why 'House of the Dragon' Episode 7 was Dark and It's Not HBO Max's Fault

For those who crave more Game of Thrones content, its prequel House of the Dragon is all the dose you'll need. After all, it is similar to Game of Thrones in many ways. Gory deaths, dramatic politics, a sprinkle of incest, and scenes that are so dark, you keep wishing for dragons to fire up the environment just to have a brighter vision of what's going on.

Viewers have been squinting their eyes while watching the latest episode of the House of Dragon. Not to worry, you are not alone as others are also wondering if their TV's display is acting up, which it is not.

Miguel Sapochnik, the director of this episode, has also directed "The Long Night" from the Game of Thrones series. You can probably connect the dots as to why it looks like the brightness setting was set to the lowest.

HBO even claimed in a tweet, as seen in The Verge's article, that this was intentional and that it was a creative decision.

Our Streaming Devices Are Not as High End

It's not a surprise that the people behind the show in charge of editing have the best equipment one could buy, especially if it's for a hit show. Their editing rooms will probably have OLED monitors that are perfectly calibrated to handle ranges of blacks and grays.

This could explain why for them, the episode was perfect in terms of brightness. Their output devices, like monitors and TVs, are so high-end that you would be able to see the scratches on Daemon's armor in total darkness.

Video Quality After Compression

When a video is compressed, parts of the video will be thrown away, thus, making the quality different from the uncompressed original video. According to Haivision, it reduces the total number of bits in a video or image which is needed to represent the needed sequence.

The thing is, these videos need to be compressed for our convenience. Streaming services need to compress files so they can deliver films more quickly and efficiently to watchers. This means that the quality we get from the cinema is simply not possible on our home devices.

Calibrate Your Television

It could help to tinker around in your TV's settings to make dimmed scenes more perceivable. You can do this by optimizing your television, as it is in default settings when you buy it.

You can do this by navigating through your TV's settings and then finding the "picture settings" to change the picture mode and adjust the brightness, contrast, and other factors.

When the scenes on the TV are too hard to see because of how dark it is, you can try setting your picture mode to Dynamic/Vivid mode. This gives your TV a brighter output, but the downside to this is that it may not show colors more accurately, which would suck if colors play a huge part in whatever you are watching.

You can also set your brightness to 50%. Why 50? According to HelloTech, too much brightness can make the output look washed out, while too little might cause you not to see anything at all.

The contrast setting may also be set at 100% to highlight the whites in the dimmer scenes you are watching, but the film may not always be dark, and in bright scenes, you might lose details.