When you play full screen video on the iPad, iOS will often do a “trick” of lowering the backlight brightness and boosting the image brightness to compensate. The problem is that this causes highlights to be clipped, making them look dull and removing detail. Why does Apple do this? Perhaps to save battery life. The only minor upside that I see is that it lowers the black level, but that is only relevant if you are watching in a relatively dark room.
If you touch the screen to bring up the playback controls, the image will return to normal contrast and brightness. I took the two images of my iPad 10.5” screen (full brightness) with my iPad 3 with the exposure locked. Images are from “The Sixth Sense” on Netflix, at 40:25.
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If you touch the screen to bring up the playback controls, the image will return to normal contrast and brightness. I took the two images of my iPad 10.5” screen (full brightness) with my iPad 3 with the exposure locked. Images are from “The Sixth Sense” on Netflix, at 40:25.