I've been testing out watching videos in the Rift and whenever there's a dark area involved, everything seems too dark. In Brave, for example, when they're in the witch's shack, the details of the scene are nearly indistinguishable. Is anyone else having similar issue/know what's the cause?
You're witnessing "black crush" a phenomenon Samsung screens. I'm not sure there's anything anyone including oculus can do about it.
Please note this is different from black smear. This has to do with the screen reading a certain RGB value and clipping it completely to black. Black smear is when part of the screen goes from pitch black to lit up and the pixels are delayed in waking up.
If the colours are too dark then you may be able to calibrate the screen colors/gamma on your computer. Other than that there's not much that can be done, sadly.
Go into your graphics card's control panel and find the display settings area. Force a higher brightness/gamma/contrast whichever one seems to fix the problem. If any of these fixes it, please report back with detailed description of which one and how much you had to change it.
Playing around with the basic Brightness/Contrast/Gamma settings make the image too shitty unfortunately 😞 Either have to choose between visible dark areas and over-bright light areas or default