Black levels lightened recently on Chromecast with Google TV?

Question

I only noticed this within the last couple days, where any letterboxed content no longer has inky black bars on my plasma, rather dark gray. It's not just the bars, it's the whole image, blacks are no longer black. I thought maybe my plasma was going through one of those lightning phases that Panasonic's supposedly go through, but upon further investigation the exact same content remains inky black and beautiful when running through my PlayStation 4. I thought maybe it was isolated to the HDMI input on my receiver, but plugging the Chromecast into the PS4 port yielded the same lightened blacks.

Has anyone noticed anything like this lately? It's such an odd thing to appear out of nowhere, and I still feel like I'm going crazy, but it's a night and day difference when I play the same show on the two devices, and that definitely wasn't the case a couple weeks ago.

mrgreyeyes · Accepted Answer

I recently had some issues with wrongly displayed HDR content. But starting and stopping the media stream would fix it.

jwort93 · Answer

I’ve noticed it specifically with all HDR10 content on the CCwGTV and my LG OLED, the blacks are elevated. I don’t use it too often at the moment, but it wouldn’t shock me if SDR blacks are elevated too.

foundfootagefan · Answer

That happened to the Nexus Player as well and Google fixed it with a kernel update.