They are pumping contrasts and saturations beyond sensible to give a "wow" effect to potential buyers, but they seem to be completely missing the mark of faithful color reproduction.
Sure, but this isn't anything new. TV manufacturers have been fiddling with TV picture modes for as long as TVs have existed.
If you pick up your remote, you'll see picture model settings like: Standard, Vivid, Sports, Movie, ISF, Dolby, etc.
The list alone will make your head spin.
Example:
First thing I notice when I walk into an electronic store is how the most expensive TV's (usually LG, Samsung, Sony OLED TV's) have their picture mode set to "Vivid", which boosts brightness and contrast to unnatural levels. It's usually next to a lower tier TV, showing a "Standard" picture mode. Guess what? You've just been fooled. The TV with the higher brightness will win that battle anytime.
It's similar to doing a speaker test with 2 speakers, but the audio store employee boosting one of the speakers by 1db. While not a big difference, it's enough for humans to pickup on the louder speaker, and therefore, the better sounding speaker. Humans are so easily fooled by such things.
Same as with TVs.
Here's a quick video overview on their differences:
but in the long run they inevitably come out for what they are, that is, not very faithful productions.
You're confusing color accuracy with picture modes. I've already talked about TV picture modes above. Now let's talk about color accuracy.
TV's every year try to push the boundary of showing the best possible picture.
We can measure this accuracy in terms of color volume or color gamut.
This procedure is very easy to do, and required a calibrated colorimeter and a PC.
Here's an article that talks about how to measure this:
A TV's color gamut defines the number of colors, or the range of colors, it can display. It's important to have a TV that displays a wide range of colors as needed.
www.rtings.com
It also shows that there are 2 standards, DCI P3 and Rec 2020. The DCI P3 color space is the color space most used in HDR content, and most 4k HDR TVs have at least good coverage of it. We repeat the process with the Rec. 2020 color space, which is wider and less common, but more content in the future may use it.
So to summarize, TV try to improve on their color accuracy every year. Seeing 3rd party independent color gamut measurements is how we know whether TV's are getting more accurate over time.
I've linked this table, which includes both DCI p3 and REC 2020 columns at the end, to show how accurate TV's are.
www.rtings.com
Based on the last information we have, the introduction of QD-OLED's from 2021, these models are finally able to hit the 100% of the DCI P3 color gamut. Before this, OLED can only hit 99.x%. So this alone means that the QD-OLEDs are capable of showing all the possible colors that the created creator could show.
If you want to learn more about TV technology, I always recommend you read/watch 2 sources:
1. rtings.com they have extensive 3rd party measurements and detailed breakdown of every TV
2. watch a youtuber called HDTVTest
https://www.youtube.com/@hdtvtest/videos Vincent is a professional TV calibrator and his in-depth knowledge of the TV technology is second to none.
Best,
sweetchaos