Spears & Munsil 4K UHD HDR Benchmark (Test Discs) May 15, 2023

[Stacey Spears]

Last time around, Florian had the disc on sale before we even received it. Since it was replicated and packaged in the Czech Republic, it was available in Europe first. That could happen this time around too.

With that said, Jason will be the first in the US to receive it since he is the official distributor and ships to all dealers.

Originally we wanted all upgrades to go through him, just to simplify, but given the cost of shipping overseas, we decided to let dealers offer the upgrade as well. We figured $20 shipping would upset people that wanted to upgrade since it would pretty much eat up the savings.

Part of the initial will be air freighted to the US to get them out quicker. The rest come by boat.

Once we give the green light, then they are replicated, packaged and shipped. Assuming no issues, I would like to finish final testing by end of March. Then I figure it should be in peoples hands by end of April.

The original plan was to have the current disc on the market in 2018 and the upgraded disc on the market in 2019. Clearly we failed since the current disc shipped after the upgraded disc was supposed to be released! The scope of this disc grew out of control. The complexity made it challenging to test. In the end, the delays made for a better quality product and patterns.

Our current Atmos tones can't be done by anyone else. Did you know there are at least two versions of the Atmos renderer at home? v2 started shipping in 2019, I believe. It was first released in sound bars and TVs. It might be trickling out in AVRs / SSPs by now. If you play someone else's, including Dolby's own, tones, there will be level difference between a 1.0 and 2.0 renderer. Dolby had to use an internal dev tool encoder to encode our Atmos tones for us. From what I understand, they used special metadata to ensure the same level comes out of our calibration tones on both v1 and v2 renderers.

I wish I would have thought it about it, but I did not include Profile A and B support of HDR10+ in the specialty section. It would have been perfect for that. The specialty section has some oddball stuff for this purpose. I forget which Profile it is, but one is mostly used by Panasonic while everyone else uses the other profile. This profile that Panasonic uses allows them to use their own tone mapping algorithm, which is something they wanted.

BD is stuck with Dolby Vision 2.9 while the rest of the world has moved on to 4.0. 4.0 added more trim pass controls, such as secondaries. It also improved the stock tone mapping algorithm. They added a custom trim pass target, which I wish we could have used. With any luck, it fixes the DVLL mode problem that 2.9 has.

Up arrow still accesses the config menu with format and nit selection. The down arrow shows the pop-up help.

The major issue with the help is that it is done in 1080p SDR. The player scales to UHD and converts to HDR. We use the menu system for our pop-up help and those are the UHD BD limitations to the menus.

When you are in DV Absolute (or Relative) mode and you bring up the pop-up help or config menu, it enables tone mapping. Absolute mode turns off tone mapping. We are not sure if this is an OPPO issue or DV issue on BD. Since absolute mode is not a standard mode, it is what it is. At this point you need to switch back to perceptual and then back to absolute. You can see this easily when looking at the tone mapping pattern in the Specialty menu.

If you are on an OPPO and switch from DV to HDR10 and back to DV, the levels may be off / wrong. You can see this on the Color Space Eval pattern. The EOTF patches at the top go from good to bad. You need to stop the disc and restart to fix it. This may mean that 60p DV on OPPO is not correct either. I sway this because we offer Color Space Eval in UHD 23.976, UHD 59.94 and HD 23.976 and at 59.94, the EOTF seems to never be correct. This does not occur on the Sony 800 MK2, which uses the same MediaTek part, so it must be a FW / SW issue and not a HW issue.

Both DV and OPPO have their own chroma upsampling issues with alignment. On top of that, MediaTek (Impacts Sony 800 Mk2 too) has some really nasty chroma upsampling issues that come and go. You can see this on the chroma diamonds. They end up with lines through them. If you switch to DV, they go away. I tend to see them the most on the scaling test patterns.

We added a 2.39:1 version of the scaling pattern for a couple of reasons.
1. 2.35/2.39 screens to see how / what occurs when you crop and scale to fill the screens.
2. Auto subtitle handling on higher end processors such as the Envy. If you enable subtitles, then we have three rows of subs that turn on/off every 10-seconds. Row 1 statels the active image and black bars. Each row of subtles is below the previous. Row 1 turns on, 10-seconds later row 2 and then row 3. They turn off in the reverse order. The subtitles are off by default.

[Kool-aid23]

Wow! Congrats Sir. Thanks for sharing your passion with us.

[panasonicst60]

I'm sure Stacey Spears loves and enjoys what's he's doing. To be able to do something you love while making some money along the way is a blessing.

[INdetectableMAN]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

BD is stuck with Dolby Vision 2.9 while the rest of the world has moved on to 4.0. 4.0 added more trim pass controls, such as secondaries. It also improved the stock tone mapping algorithm. They added a custom trim pass target, which I wish we could have used. With any luck, it fixes the DVLL mode problem that 2.9 has.

I find on my C2 the DV, even after calibration, somewhat dark in its Cinema reference mode. I see somewhat off tones and sequences on my LG C2.

In out the box I see it very dark.

Once calibrated using Calman, the improvement is noticeable, but even so I find it somewhat dark, and I don't know if it's just my incorrect perception or there really is a problem with DV that makes the image in its reference mode something else darker than it should.

I wonder if with this disc I will be able to evaluate the behavior of my C2 in DV to know for sure if my perception about DV is correct or unfounded.

And thank you very much for your excellent work and magnificent editions.

[Stacey Spears]

Have you gone through the shadow detail adjustment on your C2? On my CX, I also turned off the auto dimming feature. This is a manual process using the DR low pattern. There is a large gap between black and the measurement that Calman does above black. This manual step has you looking through a loupe at the DR low pattern and adjust until you see one of the lower steps appear. This mostly impacts levels near black, not the overall brightness of the image.

Which BD player are you using? We know that the levels for DV coming out of OPPO can be wrong.

Out of the box, the skin tone content is darker on DV than HDR10. Once you calibrate, they should be much closer. It was originally a lot darker, which is a DV 2.9 issue. DV 4.0 has improved this. To work around this on BD, I masked out the two 800+ nit pings on the chart bolt and earring. The HDR10 tool that calculates max seemed to ignore those out of place peaks. In fact, I used the max from HDR10 for DV in the end.

The reason I say DV is darker before calibration has to do with the default peak they use in the DV config file from the factory. Once you calibrate and put in the new peak luminance value, then the image is brighter than it was. The default peak value is fairly conservative from the factory.

The above won't solve your problem since you calibrated DV using Calman. I do wonder if auto dimming is getting in the way. I know for House of Dragons, the autodimming made this show extra, extra, extra dark.

[Stacey Spears]

Below are some graphs of the new Peak Luminance test pattern. The person who has been testing the pattern provided them and has a post on the other forum about them. I am sharing just four of the images. On disc there is Dolby Vision (10k), HDR10+ (10k), HDR10 at 350, 600, 1000, 2000, 4000 and 10,000 cd/m².

The higher the line, the better. The flatter the line the better.

1: Samsung S95B QD OLED 65" no heatsink


2: Sony A95K QD OLED 65" with heatsink


3: LG C2 77" no heatsink


4: LG G2 77" with heatsink


I find that the pattern is doing what I hoped it would do. The pattern is book ended by a black circle in the middle, which makes it easy to see on the chart. This is Calman measuring luminance over time. I am hoping that in the data we can extract the min, max and avg. nit values.

[INdetectableMAN]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

Have you gone through the shadow detail adjustment on your C2? On my CX, I also turned off the auto dimming feature. This is a manual process using the DR low pattern. There is a large gap between black and the measurement that Calman does above black. This manual step has you looking through a loupe at the DR low pattern and adjust until you see one of the lower steps appear. This mostly impacts levels near black, not the overall brightness of the image.

Which BD player are you using? We know that the levels for DV coming out of OPPO can be wrong.

Out of the box, the skin tone content is darker on DV than HDR10. Once you calibrate, they should be much closer. It was originally a lot darker, which is a DV 2.9 issue. DV 4.0 has improved this. To work around this on BD, I masked out the two 800+ nit pings on the chart bolt and earring. The HDR10 tool that calculates max seemed to ignore those out of place peaks. In fact, I used the max from HDR10 for DV in the end.

The reason I say DV is darker before calibration has to do with the default peak they use in the DV config file from the factory. Once you calibrate and put in the new peak luminance value, then the image is brighter than it was. The default peak value is fairly conservative from the factory.

The above won't solve your problem since you calibrated DV using Calman. I do wonder if auto dimming is getting in the way. I know for House of Dragons, the autodimming made this show extra, extra, extra dark.

Hi

No, I don't use Calman's Shadow Detailing Tool (DDC).

On the other hand, I have deactivated any type of automatic dimming (TCP / GSR) from the service menu to avoid sudden dimming problems such as those reported in chapter 7 (beach scene) of House of the Dragon.

On my unit, I have not found any relevant shadow detail issues, neither in SDR, HDR10 nor DV Cinema. I have that section correct.

And yes, indeed, the LG, like my OLED C2. out of the box in DV Cinema is excessively dark, as a consequence of what you say, that the default maximum peak that Dolby uses for the settings file will be excessively high, resulting in out of the box uncalibrated DV images excessively dark.

What you say is very true, that after calibrating through Calman 1D LUT and loading the configuration file with the maximum brightness peak correctly measured, the scenery changes and improves remarkably, that's true.

However, I still appreciate certain midtones and somewhat muted colors, such as the yellow flower in your Bechmark reference material, and I was wondering if editing the config file to a slightly lower than correct Tmax value might lead to images something brighter.

Dark scenes, I see them well, what I see something with a lack of brightness is at a general level, like with a slightly dim APL in mid-tones, but I can already say that after the calibration my DV image improved remarkably and I was almost satisfied with the result, since before calibrating it was very dark.

My players are: Panasonic UB9000, UB820 and Sony UBP X700.

Thanks for the valuable help.

[Stacey Spears]

The DDC is worth using. The jump from black to the first measurement Calman does is large enough and this is to compensate for the non-linear signal at that point. If it were perfectly linear, then the DDC would not be needed. It won't solve your issue though.

You might try messing with TMax as you suggest. I have done that before.

And you are on a C2, so you have the new tetrahedral LUT. What did you have before the C2? I am curious if you noticed an improvement with banding near black thanks to the tetrahedral LUT.

Are you seeing this issue just with Blu-ray or do you also see with streaming sources too?

[INdetectableMAN]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

The DDC is worth using. The jump from black to the first measurement Calman does is large enough and this is to compensate for the non-linear signal at that point. If it were perfectly linear, then the DDC would not be needed. It won't solve your issue though.

You might try messing with TMax as you suggest. I have done that before.

And you are on a C2, so you have the new tetrahedral LUT. What did you have before the C2? I am curious if you noticed an improvement with banding near black thanks to the tetrahedral LUT.

Are you seeing this issue just with Blu-ray or do you also see with streaming sources too?

I had several oleed of previous years, including a C1, which presented some shadow detail problems.

With the C2 I have not experienced bands of bands and posterization, and I have calibrated SDR 3D LUT of 13 points, HDR10 and DV without problems of bands near black. In that sense I am very happy with Calman and the performance of the C2.

The problem of somewhat darker DV images I have experienced both in physical format and streaming, mainly in the LG OLED, but not in Panasonic, which I also have an OLED unit ..

I am aware that my measures (which I show below) may not represent the real behavior of TVs on DV, but I will still show you to see what you think.

I think they are absolute measures EOTF PQ of the TV in DV mode in their reference modes.

This is the Panasonic, which as it see seems perfect:



And this is the LG outside the box, which as you see is excessively dark, which corroborates my visual perception when I have both teles together that the LG with the same DV reproduction material is darker:



And this is the LG after calibrating with calman and loading the DV configuration file with the correct maximum brightness measure, which as it sees what I say, since partly solves the problem, although nevertheless, comparatively speaking, continue to observe The somewhat more attenuated LG than Panasonic with real content.



And this is after correcting the configuration file with a lower Tmax value. Now is when I see the LG very similar to the Panasonic.



I am aware that for DV these types of measures do not serve to validate the DV behavior of these LG and Panasonic panels, since other types of measures are probably missing. However, I somehow give them some credit because they come to corroborate what I see live and I have perceived in the different scenarios through which I have been going through with the LG in, outside the box, after calibrating, and correcting the value Maximum Tmax.

I also know that photos are not a valid test. However, observe:

Left Panasonic Dv Dark mode, right 42c2 dv cinema off the box



C2 calibrated:



After editing Tmax:





Outside the box is very dark. Calibrated solves the problem, but not quite. And calibrated and editing Tmax, it seems that the measures and side by side are essentially the same.

However, I do not know if I am proceeding correctly or simply the Panasonic is excessively brilliant on DV that induces me to error.

[jordanwalkert]

New to Spears & Munsil so I apologize for the newbie questions. Can any type of calibration be done with this disc alone? I do not have a colorimeter or calman equipment. Just wondering if purchasing this disc would serve a benefit without all of the tools and calibration expertise or if it’s more to help guide people doing proper calibration. I have a LG C2 that I personally find pretty good out of the box, we don’t really have any professional calibrator services around where I live and I’ve never felt comfortable doing it myself. I am wondering if I could get any better picture results from using a disc like this.

[Stacey Spears]

Originally Posted by jordanwalkert

New to Spears & Munsil so I apologize for the newbie questions. Can any type of calibration be done with this disc alone? I do not have a colorimeter or calman equipment. Just wondering if purchasing this disc would serve a benefit without all of the tools and calibration expertise or if it’s more to help guide people doing proper calibration. I have a LG C2 that I personally find pretty good out of the box, we don’t really have any professional calibrator services around where I live and I’ve never felt comfortable doing it myself. I am wondering if I could get any better picture results from using a disc like this.

The best thing you can do with the C2 is get someone with Calman to perform an autocal of SDR, HDR and DV. Not sure if DV support for the C2 is in Calman yet. That is a sore subject.

If I recall correctly, you can lower contrast down from 85 to 84. (from memory, so it may be incorrect) The other thing to do is to switch to PC mode. The name can be misleading. In this mode, 4:4:4 is not downsampled to 4:2:2. Even with 4:2:0 sources, this makes a difference when it should not. I could demonstrate this for you with the disc, but for you, not spending the money on our disc is better in the long wrong. Put that money towards paying someone with Calman to autocal will make you happier.

You will want at least 100 hours of bright HDR running on the display first, to break it in.

To go into PC mode, hold down the input button on the remote for an extended period of time. This will take you to a menu that lets you change the input label / icon. Don't change the text, you want to change the icon to the one that says PC. In this mode, some TV features will be disabled. This is because those features only work in 4:2:2 and blocking the TV from going into that mode.

The C7-C9 went into 8-bit when in PC mode. The C6, CX and beyond stay in 10-bit. As I said, this benefit can be seen with 4:2:0 sources. This will be used for external sources such as a BD player (I use BD in place of 4K or UHD BD just so I type less, except when I am explaining, like now. )

Also use Cinema mode. I would not use Cinema Home.

The Video Setup and A/V Sync menus on our disc is about all you can use w/o a colorimeter. A lot of our content is for evaluating. Some customers get frustrated because they can see what is wrong, but they can't fix it and blame us for that.

[INdetectableMAN]

There is a block that currently does not allow connecting to LG 2022 via Calman. However, there is a trick that allows you to connect and perform SDR, HDR10 and Cine DV calibration in models 2022.

[Stacey Spears]

Are we permitted to post YouTube videos? I was going to post a video to the reviewer who has been testing the Peak Luminance pattern, but it keeps changing the URL.

Hoping this is the final edit of the booklet.

[Wendell R. Breland]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

Are we permitted to post YouTube videos? I was going to post a video to the reviewer who has been testing the Peak Luminance pattern, but it keeps changing the URL.

If I right click "Copy video URL" and then use "Insert Link" it does not work on this site. If I copy the address from the address bar and use "Insert Link" then it does work.

[Show spoiler]

Understanding HDR: An Interview with Joel Barsotti and Stacey Spears - YouTube

[Stacey Spears]

Let me try again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCJwbPrgPGk&t=26s&ab_channel=ClassyTechCalibrations

[kfbkfb]

I just skimmed the Wikipedia info about Blu-ray (and the UHD variant).

I was wondering if a section of the UHD test disc will have content to test for Region B/2 video conversions (from 25fps to 29.97fps et al.)?

(my Magnavox DVD player will convert PAL DVDs to NTSC format, but diagonal lines are jagged - my main concern is the interpolation process converting the frame/field rate)


Kirk Bayne

[Stacey Spears]

The disc works in all regions and is UHD. You need a UHD capable player to play the disc. A standard HD BD player will not work.

Majority of content is 23.976. There is a small section of 59.94. There is also a true 24 and 60 clip of the stock ticker, so you get 23.976, 24, 59.94 and 60 to test players and displays that don't support true 24 or 60.

There are also a few HD patterns, which include color space eval, scaling and chroma upsample eval.

[kfbkfb]

Yes, I'm in the USA and I have a UHD Blu-ray player - The Wiki page mentions that UHD Blu-ray discs can be encoded with UHD video at 23.976p, 24p, 25p, 50p, 59.94p, 60p.

I've purchased 2 PAL DVDs, some movies I want (may be on UHD Blu-ray) are not released in the USA, I'm interested in the interpolation process inside the UHD Blu-ray players for converting content from 25p and 50p to 59.94p or 60p.


Kirk Bayne

[Stacey Spears]

Nothing on the disc at 25 or 50, sorry.

[kfbkfb]

Any plans for (perhaps another disc) with interpolation test patterns for UHD Blu-ray (and maybe Blu-ray also) in player interpolation testing for the aforementioned 25p/50p -> 59.94p/60p video conversion?


Kirk Bayne