It’s no secret, the HDR on the Xbox Netflix app is subpar at best for many users.
Ever since the Xbox One X came out, HDR has been poorly optimised. Viewing any HDR content resulted, for many people, in a picture that lacked any real brightness, with noticeable clipping. This clipping caused bright areas of the screen to become dull, and crushed together into a single colour tone, rather than a well contrasted, dynamic scene.
Xbox has released an update to users on the Insider program (now including the Omega ring that I have my console enrolled in to). If you go into your display settings, there should now be an option to “Calibrate HDR for games”, which not only sets a base value for gaming, but vastly improves HDR playback on Netflix.
I cannot emphasise enough how much of an improvement this has made to viewing HDR videos. I’ve included a few photographs, but even they can’t do it justice. If only I’d had the foresight to take a few similar scenes beforehand to illustrate the difference, but to be honest, I hadn’t expected such a marked improvement.
After years of waiting for Xbox to fix the app issues, we finally have the fix we deserve, and not only is it good, it’s amazing! If you are on the Xbox Insider program, expect an update to be rolling out in the coming days. For regular users, considering how effective it is, I’d imagine it won’t be long until it is pushed out in a regular update.
I’m off to watch some more HDR video…
What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments!