What’s up with PS4’s surprise firmware update? Is 4K around the corner?

HDR is coming to <em>every</em> PS4, and that means we now know more about its HDMI controller.

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[tigas]

Not only that, even when Netflix moves wholesale to HEVC as UHDBD already is, the bitrate coming from the disk will be an order of magnitude bigger than what Netflix will be able to push though the pipes.

But as seen on CD vs MP3, convenience trumps quality.

 

[tigas]

For those asking what HDR actually brings to the home viewing experience, here's a breakdown:

[...]

Also all HDR video content out there right now is also supporting wide color gamut, which moves to the DCI/P3 colorspace from the Rec.709/HDTV one. This add lots of shades of red, blue, and green that have been present in movies in the theater for years, but that TVs either couldn't show, or content couldn't encode correctly. These also are noticeable, especially when done side-by-side with the standard HDTV version.

The good news is that UltraHD Blu-ray players, which handle this content, know how to fold it down to work on 1080p displays that don't support HDR or WCG content. I'd assume the PS4 can as well then, but that requires developers to deal with this as well possibly. Either way, both these features make more of an impact that UHD resolution (IMO), but since you can't separate them from that, it's hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison of them today.

In fact, UHDBD supports Rec.2020, which is a colorspace so large that you can map the DCI-P3 space into it without losing gamut. I do not expect any UHDBD (or any UHD streams) to support DCI-P3 natively, as it is completely alien to broadcast practices, colorscience, and code libraries. However, just the same as people were mapping sRGB to DCI-P3 and encoding to x'y'z' primaries, the x'y'z' color values will be decoded back to RGB and then processed and remastered in a Rec.2020 environment. Since most (all?) of the P3 content was created to be seen on a film theatre, having that content, un-remastered, shown in a domestic environment (even a HDR TV) would be disastrous.

 

[tigas]

IMO, the middle C would be the "whitepoint", which is a property of each colorspace. IIRC, Rec.709 and Rec.2020 share their whitepoint but the whitepoint of P3 is very different.

Also, colorspaces are defined by more than the number of bits they use to encode color values:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space