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.

Read the whole story

 

[cheinonen]

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

HDTV content is limited in range to 16-240 (going with video standards here, which more TVs follow, than the 0-255 PC standard). So if you have a white sheet or a sun, it's going to max out at that 240 level, which is usually set to around 140-160 nits in daily use. HDR moves from 8-bit to 10-bit signals, and uses a different gamma encoding standard. Gamma will control how the display ramps from black to white, and how long you stay in the shadows.

With HDR, the lower values follow a curve similar to prior gamma standards, but it then goes a bit linear past that. What this means in reality is now you can have a value of 240 for a white sheet, but that sun can have a value of 1,000 or so. The sheet or paper remains at 140-160 nits but you get bright highlights that can be between 600-1500 nits in brightness, depending on the display. This does become very noticeable in HDR content, where the sun, a campfire, or neon lights are much more vivid as they would be in real life.

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.

 

[cheinonen]

BlueTemplar[/url]":1cillmgm]

tigas[/url]":1cillmgm]

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.

Wait, I thought UHDBR standard was HDR10 which is defined to be "at least 90% of DCI-P3"?

To clarify this, all content on UHD Blu-ray (and basically anything HDR or WCG) should be using the Rec.2020 color gamut. The Rec.2020 color gamut is massive, so large that no current consumer display can show it, and those that can approach it are doing so by using multiple lasers to do so which is not affordable currently.

The content that is using HDR and WCG is using colors that exist inside of the DCI/P3 color space, but mapped inside of the Rec.2020 color gamut. So when a current HDR/WCG TV sees HDR10 or Dolby Vision content, it goes into a Rec.2020 mode, but all the content is in a smaller subset of that which current displays can actually map, and which current content uses.

Basically, doing it this way means that current UHD content will display correctly when we get displays that can do a larger percentage of the Rec.2020 gamut, it will still display this content correctly because its mapped to that gamut. Some displays were incorrectly mapping to the DCI/P3 colorspace, since that's all they can display, but most have had firmware updates to properly map it to Rec.2020 instead.

So we refer to the content as using the DCI/P3 gamut even though it's inside of a Rec.2020 container because all current content just uses that gamut and displays currently show it.

UltraHD Premium displays need to display at least 90% of the DCI/P3 color gamut, but that falls inside of a Rec.2020 container. HDR10 is the minimum they have to accept for HDR, but Dolby Vision is an option and one that will likely gain more support as chipsets that support Dolby Vision on disc become available later this year.