High Dynamic Range, explained: There’s a reason to finally get a new TV

HDR noticeably improves content that looks washed out or flat on standard screens

Read the whole story

 

[multimediavt]

BeowulfSchaeffer[/url]":3mlncda1]"Contrast"

-The difference between tones in a television picture, photograph, etc.: ‘careful adjustment of the contrast to suit the prevailing light is critical’ [in combination] ‘high-contrast images’.

This is the best descriptive single word I can think of to describe HDR. It is essentially the antithesis of how people describe non-HDR images in comparison as "muddy". As we know though, there are dangers in turning up contrast to "11" though, as it can make things seem like a Maxfield Parish painting.

Which can be cool, but not for everything.

Actually, I'd go with "anthropomorphic" over "contrast" as the word to describe HDR content. The whole idea is to more accurately approximate what the human eye is capable of seeing (in ideal form), so that compositions that include a wide range of lighting conditions look like they do when we see them with the naked eye. You shoot one image slightly over exposed and a second image that is slightly under exposed and you blend the two using the entire histogram range set by the two exposures. It's quite amazing to play with and really is stunning that it took us this long after the advent of digital photography to figure this out!

But, the whole chain, as has already been said, has to support that dynamic range from the camera to the display, to a degree on the display. For the display, yes the acronym "HDR" has more to do with the contrast and brightness capabilities of the display and most likely the color gamut range as well to better support the richness of the HDR content. HDR content is still going to look better than non-HDR content no matter what you display it on, although most analog film shot content from the last 30+ years is also going to be HDR content, for the most part. It's the digital shot content being HDR that will really be better looking. Better for directors and cinematographers to work with, too.

 

[NPPraxis]

RobDickinson[/url]":jsb9tozq]Current recorded fastest reaction time is 0.101 seconds, most are more like 0.2 seconds.

If you can notice and react to half a frame at 0.008 seconds you need to call someone...

It's not reaction time. We all know that human reaction time is in the 6-10 frame range.

In competitive Melee, though, you play to be frame perfect. It's hard to explain this, but your brain synchronizes to events on the screen. You know to make an input exactly X frames after seeing something occur. If you now have to input it X.5 frames later, you will make more mistakes. Since, as a human, you aren't exactly perfect- your inputs that would have been in the latter half of the frame are now in the next frame. While it's possible to adjust to the new timing, you will be at a disadvantage when you go play with someone else on a TV without that 8ms lag.

The result of a half frame of lag is an increased error rate for one-frame moves, and a decrease in efficiency when trying to move on the first fame (you sometimes are a frame later).

Here's a common example: Your opponent, Marth, overextends and hits you with a Forward Smash on shield, which pushes you back. Marth will take 38 more frames to finish his animation. Your shield hit animation locks you for 10 frames.

It would take 15 frames to drop your shield, or you can cancel shield with a jump. So, you have to input the jump button (X) the frame after the stun ends, or frame 11. Then, on the fourth frame after hitting jump (the frame your character leaves the ground), you want to airdodge in to the ground diagonally to slide towards the opponent. You can input grab 20 frames in to the slide and grab them.

If you're perfect, you grab Marth with only 3 frames to spare. Maybe tighter if he's further away and you need to slide further. But there are several spots in here to "lose" frames if you aren't perfect. If you're one frame late to jump, then one frame late to airdodge, and one frame left to grab...you miss.

I have been in this situation a hundred times. But if I am on a TV with 8 ms of lag, my inputs will be 8 ms off. If I make the jump input 8 ms early, the game ignores the input (I'm still locked in my block) and I miss out on my opportunity. If I make the airdodge input late, I lose distance on my slide because I wasted an extra frame rising off the ground.


That half-frame of input lag increases my error rate because I'm more likely to make my input on the wrong half of the frame and have it count for the subsequent frame. I have to try to adjust my timing by a half frame earlier, but it's quite difficult when you have a lot of muscle memory on it.


This is why all Melee players still use CRT's. A half-frame is the bare minimum acceptable- it only results in increased error rates (and particularly messes up Fox players- Fox is more demanding as far as precision). A full frame messes up all sense of timing. Fox, to do a multishine, has to input down and B, then a few frames later, X, then on exactly the fourth frame after pressing X, input down-B again. If he's perfect, he cancels his shine attack with a jump and cancels jump with a shine. If he's one frame off, the shine attack comes out after he's left the ground, and he gets locked in to it and is an easy target.


Melee is, however, a particularly difficult game. Street Fighter games (except for 5) also have some moves that precise, but they're not as common- Street Fighter buffers a lot more stuff, enabling you to be "perfect" even if you make the input early.

 

[NPPraxis]

RobDickinson[/url]":1k5jgpwi]

BehindTheSun[/url]":1k5jgpwi]

Some existing HDR-10 sets, including Samsung's line, keep the lag down to roughly 22 milliseconds at their most optimized HDR gaming modes

Honest question... is 22ms truly acceptable for gaming? I'm not a gamer, but I am a musician, and I know latencies as low as 10ms can be noticeable and sometimes problematic depending on the task at hand.

At 60fps you have ~16ms per frame , 22ms is just over a frame of action. No one is going to notice that

It can mess up your muscle memory for sure in some games. But it's acceptable for the vast majority.

 

[S4WRXTTCS]

Cheesewhiz[/url]":2orbtwsg]This article is very timely for me, probably because Black Friday sales just happened.

I put down a deposit on a LG b6 (on order) to lock in a price. I got caught up in the idea of upgrading to a fancy new 4k hdr set.

But while I'm waiting, I've cooled down on it significantly. I've kind of realized that there just isn't a whole lot of content available to make the new set worthwhile. Part of that probably has to do with the fact that my current set is an old Kuro. From what I've gathered, the OLED sets are the only sets that surpass plasma, but LG motion processing and 3:2 pull down leaves much to be desired, definitely not on par with the best old plasmas.

It doesn't help that I'd have to replace my very nice av receiver (or use some sort of kludgey wiring) and spring for a UHD blu-ray player since my PS4 won't cut it.

Between Netflix and Amazon there is plenty of HDR 4K content. The problem is you've likely watched it all.

I say this as someone who picked up a C6 LG during the black friday sales week. I had been on the fence for awhile as to whether to shell out more money for an OLED or to get a Samsung SUHD LCD.

After I got the TV I ended up mostly watching 4K HDR nature shows I hadn't watched before.

But, I still had no regrets about getting it. Sure it's going to get cheaper/better, but that's just how technology is. It's not always easy to time the jump. But, I think right now is a good time since the OLED's recently dropped quite a bit. The 65inch C6 that I picked up was $2799 with the black friday deal), and before then the last price I saw it at was close to $4K. I do expect to see further price drops, but I'd be surprised if they happened within the next 6 months or so.

Plus there is The Grand Tour, and that by itself is a huge draw.

 

[cwsars]

RobDickinson[/url]":4lj4qhuc]Current recorded fastest reaction time is 0.101 seconds, most are more like 0.2 seconds.

If you can notice and react to half a frame at 0.008 seconds you need to call someone...

Reaction time measurements involve noticing a new stimulus and then clicking a button or similar.

People can notice artifacts like motion judder or the "soap opera effect" from telecine pulldown which occur at the millisecond to ~ten millisecond realm. Specifically, the difference between 24p and 30p content is ~7ms per frame, since most displays will run at 60 Hz and display 24p using 3:2 or 2:3:3:2 pulldown.

 

[equals42]

ej24[/url]":38ri566w]

l27[/url]":38ri566w]Until sub $2k 65"+ "FLAT" OLED tv's hit the market I'm not buying another tv.

I do have a 2015 65" lg 4k non hdr tv that I paid $1k for last December. But it replaced a 2008 sammy 52" that was on its last leg. Already replaced the caps once and it started having trouble turning on again. So that was it for me.

We got close on black Friday. Spotted a flat 4k 55" LG OLED, the B6 model iirc, for $1500 on Amazon with free shipping. The 65" was $2.5k. So the price per inch was way better on the 55". I was very tempted to get the 55. Couldn't convince myself and my girlfriend as to exactly why we NEEDED it. My 49" Philips TV from 2008 still works so I guess I can't complain. The longer I wait the more likely OLED will drop in price and any certification and/or standards war will be played out. For example, I can't imagine having dropped untold sums of money on a first gen 4k display before hdmi 2.0 was finalized and available.

I pulled that trigger on the LG B6 65". It may be more than a year before the 65" OLEDs drop below 2k and I have been desiring one for a few years now. The HDCP 2.2, HDMI 2.0a, HDR-10, and Dolby Vision in this year's version has me convinced now is the time. There will always be a better one but this set of features and standards leads me to think it'll be able to handle what's coming for quite a few years.

 

[BlueTemplar]

dollyllama[/url]":zv7wo3qf]

hughesj919[/url]":zv7wo3qf]I find it confusing that that marketers have commandeered another term that had a defined meaning within the imaging community (HDR = high dynamic range) and are using it for something that doesn't mean that.

Not as bad as Microsoft's hijacking of "holography" for its HoloLens project, which has nothing to do with holography, and the media's blithely following in line behind them.

The blame is on George Lucas, Microsoft did it decades after the new meaning has settled down.

 

[BlueTemplar]

MechR[/url]":no026wrv]This reminds me of the 10-bit anime-encoding crusades of yesteryear. (10-bit won.) Do those encodes see any extra benefit from a 10-bit screen?

10-bit is the minimum for the new HDR specs, not sure what you are referring to, since it would seem that it's been only a few years since real 10-bit displays were available, and you probably wouldn't see any noticeable difference with 8-bit content on lower than 10-bit screens.

 

[BlueTemplar]

BarkingGhostAR[/url]":k9g45b3q]

Jamjen831[/url]":k9g45b3q]

Ever since the HDTV standard emerged in the mid-'00s, screen producers have struggled to come up with new standards that feel anywhere as impressive. That's been a tough sell, as no baseline image standard has yet surpassed the quality jump from CRT sets to clearer panels with 1080p resolution support.

We went a very, very long time on SD content before HD. Shit, my parents owned the same CRT TV for decades. The only reason to replace it was it it broke (which you used to be able to get repaired).

Which is worse considering what percentage of SD TV one must buy from the major cable and satellite providers before even allowed access to pseudo-HS content. Since they are still milking the ~70 year old cow and the fact that USA didn't adopt the ATSC specification until 1996, maybe we should wait until 2066 before moving beyond ATSC.

Maybe, just maybe, Comcast and DirecTV (and U-verse) will finally shut off SD and stop acting like the majority of their customers are ONLY interested in that.

The BBC seemingly has their own version of a HDR specification, tailored for broadcast TV.

Also, wrt the article, it isn't like we jumped straight from SD CRT's to 1080p LCD's...

 

[BlueTemplar]

Richard Berg[/url]":33xjnx0d]

Carewolf[/url]":33xjnx0d]

hughesj919[/url]":33xjnx0d]I find it confusing that that marketers have commandeered another term that had a defined meaning within the imaging community (HDR = high dynamic range) and are using it for something that doesn't mean that. Dynamic range is supposed to be the difference between the max and minimum measurable light intensities in an image.

These "HDR" tv's boil down to a wider color gamut (i.e. one that more closely represents what the human eye is capable of -- always a good thing) and higher per pixel luminance variations. Is that the takeaway here?

Increasing the dynamic range expands the color gamut. What we are usually lacking are the dynamic extremes. If you look at color gamut graphs (typical color triangles), the bigger color spaces has corners that more extreme than those of the smaller color spaces. They have that increased gamut due to increased dynamic range. If anything is being mixed it is that we are also increasing precision at the same time.

Right. It's mathematically impossible to have one without the other! In a colorspace with limited luma precision, high brightness requires low saturation.

Consider the well known 8-bit sRGB color space. The only way to render bright pixels is by having all 3 channels above 150, especially the Green channel. You can choose colors that are close to pure Blue (R<G<50), but they won't be very bright. In aggregate, this effect means that brighter scenes will be more washed-out than darker scenes.

Even if your display can't physically render the deepest blues of Rec2020, it's worth encoding your content in that colorspace so you can have high brightness and amped-up saturation in the same scene. (so long as you have enough bits to cover the whole triangle w/o banding)

But if your screen isn't able to display the whole Rec2020 gamut of the picture, won't you have to map down the colors... or risk losing the difference between the colors outside of display's gamut?

 

[guntherv]

Is there an actual technical reason why there is no 1080 with HRD?
Or is it simply positioning "the latest and best" (= so 4k mandatory) in the market?

Personally I'm still on a 32" LCD and it works fine for me, the biggest I would go (and many of my friends - also EU based - if I see what they bought the last few years ) is 43" .

1080p is fine and dandy for that size. 4K would be simply overkill and saturate my internet connection (and NAS..) for nothing...

 

[dollyllama]

BlueTemplar[/url]":ee0b7y0r]

dollyllama[/url]":ee0b7y0r]
Not as bad as Microsoft's hijacking of "holography" for its HoloLens project, which has nothing to do with holography, and the media's blithely following in line behind them.

The blame is on George Lucas, Microsoft did it decades after the new meaning has settled down.

Sorry, no, Microsoft and the kiss-ars media are fully to blame for ascribing holography to the technology behind HoloLens. Star Wars is science fiction/fantasy and only popularized the idea of communicating through holography.

 

[Zak]

laitpojes[/url]":234xkt2n]

Zak[/url]":234xkt2n]LOL, my wife does not appreciate the difference between a DVD and BD. Why would I buy a new TV?

Great great point - I still routinely see families where one half of the equation just doesn't "see it" or even remotely care enough about it (whether it's Blu-Ray, 1080vs720, etc) to have it guide new purchases.

Exactly. And I don't watch movies enough to justify the purchase and drive the upgrade; and honestly, from afar 720p looks fine to me on a 42" screen. She cares about the content, not how good the content looks like. She often doesn't even bother switching the web browser window to a full screen when watching Netflix or Amazon. I meet a lot of people like that at work too.

 

[Darkness1231]

10-20ms delay?

Ah, fine then. It isn't a gaming monitor/display or anything else related to video games. Everything else adds to the delay and getting a button recognized by the game itself can be bad enough, but adding nearly a frame (over a frame at 60fps) can do nothing for the experience.

I skipped the 3D schlock train, 4k isn't all that compelling and now the HDR will have to wait until the set manufacturers quit designing in too small computers to control the set. One wonders if they are as fast as the current phones.

Maybe one day they will realize the customer wants a usable product, not just a pretty one.

 

[EKR]

From the article:

With more quantifiable steps in luminance come more wiggle room for displaying ranges of saturated colors.

It should be "comes", as "wiggle room" is the subject of the sentence.

(I'm just saying)

 

[shawhu]

A great article except for one tiny little problem about HRD in your phone. It takes multiple pictures all right but not with different "White Balance" settings but Shutters. It creates a batch of pictures from the darkest to the brightest and combines them together.

White Balance is to determine which part of picture is white and change the tone of the picture according to that very white spot. To combine several pictures with different white balance settings will be disastrous.

Here is a wikipedia entry to reference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-dyna ... Processing

 

[rallant92]

I'm surprised the power usage of the HDR sets weren't checked by the article. If a goal of HDR is to exceed the standard 100 nits, then I imagine the backlights on LED sets must be using a lot more power that is mostly just filtered back out. Put simply, is my power bill going to double so I can better watch fancy sports cars racing at sunset? Do I have to manually switch in and out of HDR mode per show to re-achieve the Energy Star power usage?

 

[Cheesewhiz]

S4WRXTTCS[/url]":341dkp2q]

Cheesewhiz[/url]":341dkp2q]This article is very timely for me, probably because Black Friday sales just happened.

I put down a deposit on a LG b6 (on order) to lock in a price. I got caught up in the idea of upgrading to a fancy new 4k hdr set.

But while I'm waiting, I've cooled down on it significantly. I've kind of realized that there just isn't a whole lot of content available to make the new set worthwhile. Part of that probably has to do with the fact that my current set is an old Kuro. From what I've gathered, the OLED sets are the only sets that surpass plasma, but LG motion processing and 3:2 pull down leaves much to be desired, definitely not on par with the best old plasmas.

It doesn't help that I'd have to replace my very nice av receiver (or use some sort of kludgey wiring) and spring for a UHD blu-ray player since my PS4 won't cut it.

Between Netflix and Amazon there is plenty of HDR 4K content. The problem is you've likely watched it all.

I say this as someone who picked up a C6 LG during the black friday sales week. I had been on the fence for awhile as to whether to shell out more money for an OLED or to get a Samsung SUHD LCD.

After I got the TV I ended up mostly watching 4K HDR nature shows I hadn't watched before.

But, I still had no regrets about getting it. Sure it's going to get cheaper/better, but that's just how technology is. It's not always easy to time the jump. But, I think right now is a good time since the OLED's recently dropped quite a bit. The 65inch C6 that I picked up was $2799 with the black friday deal), and before then the last price I saw it at was close to $4K. I do expect to see further price drops, but I'd be surprised if they happened within the next 6 months or so.

Plus there is The Grand Tour, and that by itself is a huge draw.

Well, its not just the available content. Its the additional costs associated, like UHD player and receiver, though those can be added later. That and justifying the cost: the new set has to be a good upgrade over my current set. And I'm not sure I see that.

My current set is a Pioneer Kuro. The OLED is better w/contrast, sure, but not at motion, processing, or color. And I wouldn't even consider a LCD. The only LCD I saw that was arguably better than my current set is the Sony Z9 @ $5.5k, and that was mostly a function of its very good image processing. All of which means the b6 is only marginally better than my current set at 1080p content. Therefore, its all about native 4k which for sure will blow my set away. And that brings me back to available 4k content.

I do need to watch the grand tour though...

 

[Statistical]

guntherv[/url]":yi0jidr5]Is there an actual technical reason why there is no 1080 with HRD?
Or is it simply positioning "the latest and best" (= so 4k mandatory) in the market?

Personally I'm still on a 32" LCD and it works fine for me, the biggest I would go (and many of my friends - also EU based - if I see what they bought the last few years ) is 43" .

1080p is fine and dandy for that size. 4K would be simply overkill and saturate my internet connection (and NAS..) for nothing...

There is no technical reason why you can't have 1080p and HDR although it is not going to happen.

1) Marketing. Advertising UHD (4K & HDR) is a lot easier than "same exact resolution as your current but more colors so more expensive").

2) Consumers are dumb. Virtually all HDR content is 4K. Imagine the fun of explaining to customers w/ 1080p HDR set they need to pay for and download/stream the 4K version of content in order to get HDR for their 1080p set.

3) Pricing. 4K HDTVs have crushed the price of 1080p sets. Manufacturers see 4K and HDR as a way to have slightly higher margins. Taking a selling feature off 4K sets to put on the cheaper sets is just not going to happen.

So the bad news is you won't get HDR w/o 4K. The good news is eventually every TV will be 4K. I mean they already are making 40" 4K sets and 32" isn't that far away. Eventually it will be no more expensive than a 1080p set is now.

 

[t_newt]

RobDickinson[/url]":qxj3trh2]Current recorded fastest reaction time is 0.101 seconds, most are more like 0.2 seconds.

If you can notice and react to half a frame at 0.008 seconds you need to call someone...

So you see someting and react within 0.125 seconds. A competitor reacts within 0.105 seconds because his display is 20ms faster, and he wins.

Michael Phelps won his seventh gold medal by 1ms. His reaction time isn't 1ms, but overall he was 1ms faster. That's all that counts.

 

[cwsars]

rallant92[/url]":18f9e0b8]I'm surprised the power usage of the HDR sets weren't checked by the article. If a goal of HDR is to exceed the standard 100 nits, then I imagine the backlights on LED sets must be using a lot more power that is mostly just filtered back out. Put simply, is my power bill going to double so I can better watch fancy sports cars racing at sunset? Do I have to manually switch in and out of HDR mode per show to re-achieve the Energy Star power usage?

I'm pretty sure that the peak brightness is only supported for something like 1-2% of the pixels lit at a time. It looks like a Samsung UN55KU7000 has a typical power usage of 54W and peak of 135W, and a UN55KS8000 is 55W / 139W peak. That seems to be more efficient than their 2015 models and many of the competing brands.

Also notice the peak vs sustained brightness measurements:

http://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/ks8000

Peak 2% Window: 1472 cd/m2
Peak 10% Window: 1431 cd/m2
[ ... ]
Sustained 2% Window: 505 cd/m2
Sustained 10% Window: 508 cd/m2

 

[SraCet]

cwsars[/url]":39sn1zdl]

rallant92[/url]":39sn1zdl]I'm surprised the power usage of the HDR sets weren't checked by the article. If a goal of HDR is to exceed the standard 100 nits, then I imagine the backlights on LED sets must be using a lot more power that is mostly just filtered back out. Put simply, is my power bill going to double so I can better watch fancy sports cars racing at sunset? Do I have to manually switch in and out of HDR mode per show to re-achieve the Energy Star power usage?

I'm pretty sure that the peak brightness is only supported for something like 1-2% of the pixels lit at a time. ...

How does that work?

LCD screens don't light pixels. They darken pixels, i.e., block the backlight for dark pixels.

If an LCD screen is using significantly less power for dark content, I assume that means it's doing local dimming, which comes with its own image quality problems (visible boundaries of local dimming zones, etc.).

 

[SraCet]

If you transmit video (on disc, game, or streaming service) via the current, industry-wide HDTV standard, you're capped at a luminance maximum of around 100 nits. Your screen may be brighter than that, but this is where the current standard really stinks. In that case, the signal sends its luminance information as a percentage, not a pure luminance value. It's up to your set to translate that percentage, and the results can look, quite frankly, pretty awful. This is how viewers get blown-out colors and other glaring inaccuracies.

Huh? Why are absolute values better than percentages? Does this mean you can't change the brightness on an HDR TV? How does that make any sense? This article is confusing.

 

[Stapedium]

"New HDR standards not only jack a pixel's luminance maximum up but also change the encoded value to a specific number, not a percentage. "

Does this mean that these TV will not have any brightness control? Our eyes are relative contrast detectors not absolute luma cameras, so what happens if I put it in my living room instead of basement? Is there no way to adjust for environmental lighting?

I guess the bigger question for me is can the displays actually reproduce the wider color gamut, finer grained bit depth differences and higher luma range that the spec allows for. While the "trembling" description may have emotional impact, ars readers expect more. Did you test if the display that made you tremble could produce the claimed color gamut and luma range?

 

[Richard Berg]

Why are absolute values better than percentages?

Because human perception is nonlinear. Gradations that make sense at 100 nits don't make sense at 4000 nits.

A relative-value (percentage-like) system that had a log axis would be fine. And indeed we have working examples of this. It's called gamma.

 

[jarberish]

Bubbleboyjones[/url]":396jun9d]

TheFu[/url]":396jun9d]1 word. Projector.

No interest in having a TV that is connected to the network and reporting on my family's usage. Don't need another unpatched device on the network.

A dumb projector solves all that. 100 inch screen. If you can control the light in the room, 500 lumen is sufficient, though more is always better. Been using a cheap-ish LED projector the last 5 yrs here. No lamp bulb to blow. Over 10K hrs on it now.

TVs are just, so, so, so, small. Playing SOCOM or Ace Combat or Grand Turismo on a projector is a completely different experience too.

Projectors are the best way to go. If you don’t have the room for one and live in a small NYC style bachelor apartment I suggest rolling a computer chair over in front of your TV and sitting extremely close. You can actually emulate a decent movie watching experience sitting 5-6 ft from a 50” plasma with bluray. You have to sit back farther if your watching any source that has lossy compression like cable.

There's also laser light and ultra short throw projectors. Laser light projectors are awesome. All the models I've seen with laser light engines have them rated for at least 20k hours. If I was in an apartment that small, an ultra short throw projector would definitely be on my options list. Heck, Viewsonic was just showing off a 1080p ultra short throw, laser light projector a few months ago. I will definitely consider something like that next time, regardless of room size.

They do tend to lag a bit behind other segments in the TV market in terms of features and pricing, at least in the home entertainment market, but I do hope this HDR trend pushes projector makers to achieve much greater contrast ratios so they'll be there when I'm back in the market again.

 

[SraCet]

Richard Berg[/url]":1ksf8gsq]

Why are absolute values better than percentages?

Because human perception is nonlinear. Gradations that make sense at 100 nits don't make sense at 4000 nits.

A relative-value (percentage-like) system that had a log axis would be fine. And indeed we have working examples of this. It's called gamma.

I buy that, but absolute values don't necessarily do anything to address the problem of nonlinear perception. If the absolute values are distributed linearly on some scale, then they are literally exactly the same as percentages, just over a specific luminance range.

 

[Stapedium]

CUclimber[/url]"]Isn't low-bitrate streamed content still more of a factor than color channel depth when it comes to banding? It's all fine and well if you're playing content off of a Blu-Ray disc, but (IMO) all bets are still off if you're streaming from Amazon or Netflix.[/quote

This!

Amazon HDR = 15 Mbps

BluRay = 40 Mbps

4K BluRay = 82-128 Mbps

Strange how there was no streaming content that made the author visibly shake.

 

[aaronb1138]

will_ssi[/url]":3b8dz1un]

aaronb1138[/url]":3b8dz1un]
A few people have discussed banding and other color errors. These have nothing to do with your television not having enough bits of color precision, they have everything to do with digital processing which incorrectly handles the least significant bits and rounding errors at various processing stages. Most TVs will get WAY more banding when color space effects like "Vivid" modes are applied. This can easily be eliminated when you test a source device doing the color space processing, like a good video card and playback software in a PC, you can apply the same effective processing curve and voila! color banding is gone because rounding errors and least significant bits were handled sanely.

Further, many color banding effects in the dark end of the spectrum, very apparent in night scenes and similar also manifest due to poor software CODEC implementations. Heck, in the heyday of DVD, there were numerous side by side comparisons with VHS and LaserDisc, the formerbeing analog at a fewer number of lines of resolution (much less raster pixels per line) handled high motion content better by virtue of being uncompressed full frame and LaserDisc being uncompressed digital 480P. Ultimately the lossy bitrates of MPEG-2 as implemented in DVD was garbage.

This person gets it. Even if some of your points aren't correct (I'm not qualified to tell), I really wish Ars would get back to the skeptical consumer point of view when discussing new technologies.

This is increasingly absent under the Conde Nast; develop the alpha consumer regime. An easy example to examine is John Gitlin's article list. Reviews of all these gee whiz VAG cars (the Maccan review was pure infotisement), suddenly cut short by dieselgate, but now all kinds of positive murmurs about Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche having compelling vehicles and ignoring the ethically bankrupt positions of VAG for consumers (their diesels were explicitly marketed as so much more powerful and clean).

 

[Xign]

will_ssi[/url]":30hn2hdd]

I also think it's a bit misleading to present banding in the manner you did. Most, if not all, users will experience banding because of video compression coupled with bandwidth limitations. On my e-IPS panel with ~96% of the sRGB gamut and my amateur color calibration job, I have never seen banding in uncompressed HD movies.

Ars provides a great pro-consumer voice, so please be careful of repeating marketing information. If you're going to discuss banding, you should do it in an honest way: if you're seeing it on your current screen, it's either a low quality TN panel or, more likely, the result of compression and bandwidth limitations.

Actually, 8-bit colors do quite largely contribute to the banding you see. A simple test is go to Photoshop, make a new image (e.g. 1024x1024), and draw a gradient from corner to corner, from green 128 (out of 255) to 0, so basically dark green to black.

Now, you won't see banding but that's because Photoshop turns on dithering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither) by default a.k.a. it scatters the colors around to smooth it out. If you turn off dithering to get an honest gradient, you will see clear banding lines in your gradient, and this effect is more pronounced when you try to create a gradient among darker colors with fewer bits to use.

Basically, if you do 8-bit only the differences among individual darker colors are perceptually distinguishable, hence requiring tricks like dithering to help smooth them out (and hence sometimes you won't see it). If we get HDR-10 and especially the 12-bit color ranges that Dolby Vision is going for you shouldn't see banding even if you don't dither.

Edit: The green 128 I mentioned is assumed to be in something similar to sRGB, rather than linear color space.

 

[Mazarin]

Yet HDR may very well be the most impactful addition to modern TV sets since they made the 1080p jump. Images are brighter and more colorful, yes—and in ways that are unmistakable to see even to the untrained eye.

Aaaand it's grammar nazi time: "impactful" is not a word...or it should not be. Been writing a lot of ad copy?

In some ways, the HDR impact was more noticeable only after comparing playback on various screens: the LG B6, the Le-Eco Super4 X55, and a 2014 Vizio E-series LCD set (that one's SDR). Color differentials with bright blue skies and orange-white sands held their integrity better on the certified set by far, but other friends who were watching were more willing to take or leave the image boosts seen in average scenes.

In other words, most people aren't going to care much about this new technology. Only those with too much money to spend will be watching HDR for a long time yet. When they get to the price of ordinary TVs, and my present plasma set stops working, maybe I'll even buy one.

 

[Richard Berg]

SraCet[/url]":1b3oj388]

Richard Berg[/url]":1b3oj388]

Why are absolute values better than percentages?

Because human perception is nonlinear. Gradations that make sense at 100 nits don't make sense at 4000 nits.

A relative-value (percentage-like) system that had a log axis would be fine. And indeed we have working examples of this. It's called gamma.

I buy that, but absolute values don't necessarily do anything to address the problem of nonlinear perception. If the absolute values are distributed linearly on some scale, then they are literally exactly the same as percentages, just over a specific luminance range.

Right, which is why the new specs don't use a single number scale. They incorporate both relative values (10 bits of nonlinear scale) and absolute values (metadata defining how bright 2^10-1=1023 should be). There's a bit more to it than that, but those are the key ideas.

SMPTE ST 2084 has the gory details: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7291452/

 

[Kressilac]

The thing with all this tech that people have to remember. You can't go more than 15' from source to sink with it. Right now, HDR isn't done over HDBaseT. Fall 2017 is when Atlona is coming out with an extender that supports the additional needed bandwidth.

http://atlona.com/product/at-cent-301-cea/

The current HDBaseT extender versions support the HDMI 1.4 standard which caps at 4K @60Hz 8 bit 4:2:0 or 4K @24Hz 12bit 4:4:4.

Don't get me wrong. There's a great picture to be had at 4K under those standards but if you run out and buy a large screen 4K HDR set and expect your components on the other side of the room to work, they will not; at least not using the TVs maximum settings. If your Xbox One S/UHD Blu-Ray is right next to the TV or you use the smart apps inside the TV, you're all set.

 

[Kressilac]

Cheesewhiz[/url]":115s3r02]

joequincy[/url]":115s3r02]

Statistical[/url]":115s3r02]

Breakbeat[/url]":115s3r02]I'm not 100% clear. So for HDR you need a HDR source, a HDR player and a HDR TV correct? And all of them need to be the same HDR format (HDR-10/Dolby Vision) compatible?

Yes. Although at this point HDR-10 has won. No new TVs are being made that are Dolby Vision only. Everything is HDR-10 or both.

Note just like how HDTVs would upconvert non HD material many HDR TVs will upconvert SDR to HDR but this is decidedly fake looking. To get real HDR the entire chain from source to display needs to be HDR.

This is not entirely true. The Dolby Vision spec is can accept HDR-10 content. If your disc and player are both HDR-10, you can use a Dolby Vision TV to view the content. Or, if your disc is HDR-10, you can view it on a Dolby Vision player and TV.

What I'm not 100% sure about is whether you can play an HDR-10 disc in a Dolby Vision player, and have it work on an HDR-10 display. Theoretically, the player wouldn't have to convert the data to Dolby Vision, but I don't know how this actually works out in practice.

Essentially though, if you splurge for a Dolby Vision display and player, you'll be able to view any HDR content from either spec... it's just that most current (home) content isn't using Dolby Vision at this point, so your HDR-10 content won't see any advantage over HDR-10 devices in such a setup.

Yes, well, as of right now, there are no dolby vision players, largely because dolby hasn't finalized the spec for players.

My understanding is that dolby vision is an overlay of hdr10. HDR-10 is the base spec, and dolby vision is a bit of an add on. Its sort of like DTS or THX.

It is my understanding that Dolby Vision is HDR taken further than HDR-10 by incorporating some of the Dolby Cinema specifications into HDR-10 but it is not like DTS or THX. DTS is a competing sound technology to Dolby's sound technologies. THX is a theater specification for the construction of a theater to best present THX certified content on THX certified equipment. Dolby Cinema is Dolby's THX competing equivalent.

 

[Fritzr]

Breakbeat[/url]":10p8t3by]I'm not 100% clear. So for HDR you need a HDR source, a HDR player and a HDR TV correct? And all of them need to be the same HDR format (HDR-10/Dolby Vision) compatible?

Aside from the Dolby Vision sets supporting HDR-10 as a lesser format, that is correct.

To get the full Dolby Vision effect you need a DV input device, a recording done in DV and a DV display. With smart TVs the input device may be built into the TV reducing the number of things you need to worry about.

Should they not all support the same format, they will fall back to the best that all support. Simple 4K for example with a 4K BluRay player that supports only SDR or an older SDR TV would prevent you from seeing the DV or HDR-10 effects supplied by a Dolby Vision BluRay or HDR-10 BluRay.

To add to the confusion there will be manufacturers selling "compatible" hardware that has not been through the certification process for the standards they claim to support. It might work as well as certified equipment, but the only guarantee is that the sales rep says it is just as good.

 

[Fritzr]

Statistical[/url]":1hmun0nu]

laitpojes[/url]":1hmun0nu]As a primarily sports & streaming viewer, honestly none of this does anything for me until all of the infrastructure is in place.

Sports in particular, especially the more niche and not prime time events, may take half a decade or more to even go 4K.

Just no reason to dive into HDR anytime soon for some segments of viewers.

Well sports may be a while to convert to UHD but the infrastructure for streaming is in place assuming you have decent internet speeds. House of cards in UHD on Netflix is pretty amazing. Now not everything is 4K and HDR yet but the library of content is growing pretty rapidly. It should accelerate even more in 2017.

Not quite all is in place ... We still need universal broadband for streaming 4K of any kind. Remember to send a thank you note to your favorite cable provider for their assistance in ensuring that universal broadband is largely unable to corrupt American youth

 

[Yoshi]

HDR, another marketing ploy to make you think you need a new TV. Some of us have been enjoying rich color with high dynamic range and very low latency on Pioneer plasma displays since 2008. Glad to see LCD is still figuring things out. Looking forward to seeing OLED mature...

 

[iwod]

Yoshi[/url]":1jekqyis]HDR, another marketing ploy to make you think you need a new TV. Some of us have been enjoying rich color with high dynamic range and very low latency on Pioneer plasma displays since 2008. Glad to see LCD is still figuring things out. Looking forward to seeing OLED mature...

Exactly my thought, although not sure on low latency. But of coz Plasma have its own problem with burning etc.

I am hoping on MicroLED. Basically every Pixel is also a LED AND sensor. May be in 5 years time.

 

[Goofball_Jones]

patriedes[/url]":2whx9s31]Thanks for distinguishing between HDR photography (still images) and video. All the HDR images I've seen look like someone turned the brightness setting up to 11. It has the effect of making real life images look somehow faked, imho.

Yes, like that Trey Ratcliff guy that people seem to fawn over. It's just gimmick photography. I mean, it has it's place and if you use it subtly, it can be great. But just cranked to the max and people go "ooooh, you're so talented and original!" give me a break.

 

[matthew.kuiash]

Banding? W00T!? Didn't your mother ever teach you how to dither?