Quote:
Originally Posted by notops
You claimed to own personal 35 mm prints. After that statement of yours, I question if you've ever even seen a 35 mm print of a movie.
It's physically impossible to simulate the black levels of HDR content (on an OLED, no less  ) by shining a lamp through a black filter of film. That's why non HDR blacks look greyish by comparison.
You'll just have to roll your eyes at the laws of physics on that one |
Yep. When this tiny strip of film has light blasted through it onto a reflective screen then black levels are the first thing to suffer, it's why gamma is so super-high on release prints, it's an attempt to give it a decent level of contrast in that environment. There are other methods that people have used to create deeper black levels like bleach bypass and other related processes, which leaves a layer of undeveloped silver on the film that would otherwise be washed off. This extra layer adds density and literally blocks more light from coming through, David Fincher used it on Se7en because he wanted the image to disappear into the darkness in the theater, that people wouldn't know where the screen ended and the border began. And while I may not have seen a 35mm print in 8 years I've seen plenty of 15/70 IMAX prints in that time and their blacks were bang average as well.
Not saying that all this "perfect black" and "infinite contrast" isn't something to aim for if we can get it - hence laser projectors being used in the cinema to deliver much higher contrast and proper 'off' blacks - but meh blacks have been a fixture of cinema for quite some time, and it's not just a modern digital malaise. Even my ZD9 does black levels that smash anything I've seen in a cinema for as long as I can remember (though the Sony 4K projector for Alien the other night was better than some I've seen), never mind what an OLED can do.