Severance Blu Ray quality is lacking compared to the Apple TV stream

Popped in disc one of severance tonight to start rewatching it with some of my cousins, and I couldn’t help but notice pretty egregious banding and blocked in tons of dark scenes in all 3 episodes.

The Blu-ray.com review boasts how good this show looked on blu ray vs the stream but that’s not my experience at all. I threw in a couple photos for reference. LG B3 set to filmmaker mode for the blu ray player and set to cinema Dolby vision on the Apple TV 4K

Upon writing this post, I did play with the gamma settings, as I had it set to 2.2 in SDR filmmaker mode, and reverting to the BT.1886 gamma does seem to give a little bit better performance, but it still lacks in comparison big time compared to the Apple TV. I even raised the black level a ridiculous amount on the Apple TV input and could still find no artifacting.

It legit looks like a full blown swap of the usual streaming vs blu ray comparison, but in the other direction this time. Pics 1, 3, 5, and 7 are of the Apple TV 4K stream, and pics 2, 4, 6, 8, and 9 are of the blu ray disc.

I understand there’s a difference between SDR and HDR, I shoot/edit video for a living, but this is a matter of compression and bit rate, not a color space issue. During the scenes in included pictures of, the bit rate dips pretty sharply into the low teens.

I played with the settings a bit in a different preset to try and better match the overall exposure of the Apple TV stream and had to lower the pixel brightness, the contrast, and the black level to get a reasonably close image. Still, the blu ray is still noticeably grainier, even with the significantly lower black level that does hide most of the compression issues.

I’m starting to think it’s more of a gamma issue or just overall poor mastering for this version of the show.

Has anyone else watched these discs and/or compared them to the streaming counter part?