TV makers showing off their wares at CES this week seem to have abandoned the race for ever more pixels. Instead “high dynamic range” seems to be the new buzzword.
Having told everyone how great full HD is, only to then turn around and say 1080p is pretty much equivalent to a child’s drawing and that 4K is the way to go, manufacturers don’t seem comfortable pulling the same ploy with the forthcoming 8K sets. That’s largely because they are still waiting for some significant 4K content before they can first sell and then downplay that format’s resolution.
Instead the new tack is telling us we need a wider range of colors and shades on the screen, something known as HDR. Pretty much every major manufacturer says it’s going to support the technology with future sets and have agreed to follow a benchmarking scheme under the banner of “Ultra HD Premium.”
HDR with televisions has nothing to do with the system of the same name in digital photography. While the photo HDR involves merging two images to create an “artificial” one, television HDR doesn’t change the basic concept of what the screen does.
The differences are simply increased brightness (in turn increasing the potential contrast) and a wider color palette. The Ultra HD Premium standard has a minimum threshold for both, as well as requiring processing of 10-bit signals (compared with 8-bit on normal sets).
Unfortunately, it seems some manufacturers plan to use terms such as “HDR compatible” which simply means the set can play content designed with HDR in mind, but doesn’t actually offer any of the benefits.
Another problem is that, arguably even more than with screen resolution, HDR really needs specially created content to be of any value. While sets can take low-resolution footage and upscale it by creating “in between” pixels, turning normal high-resolution footage in HDR means replacing existing pixels. That’s like to give a much more artificial result and be even more reliant on algorithmic assumptions.
At the moment Netflix and Amazon have both experimented with a few shows supporting HDR and a handful of 4K Blu-rays use the format, but TV broadcasters haven’t shown any signs of developing a common format for sending HDR signals over the air or through cable TV.
The real issue is that although it’s perfectly viable to argue that increasing contrast and color detail does more to improve the “realism” of a picture than going beyond 1080p on ordinary household sets, it’s going to be incredibly tough to sell that to the general public. Cinephiles with cash to splash will always be willing buyers, but most people who’ve replaced a TV set in the past 10 years were convinced that full HD was all that was needed to make for a magical viewing experience and will find it hard to believe that it’s no longer sufficient.