4K Movies Releases

[Kris Deering]

Got the chance to attend a nice presentation from the folks at Spectracal yesterday at their offices. They set up two of the new Vizio 65" Reference series monitors. On one they were playing the Dolby Vision 4K HDR content available on VUDU with the display calibrated to the Dolby Golden Standard at about 600 nits. On the other they had the same movie playing from a Blu-ray with the monitor calibrated to 100 nits with a 3D LUT box ensuring perfect REC 709 calibration.

Some takeaways, the biggest benefit I saw from HDR was the color and detail. Because you see less clipping in areas, fine details were preserved nicely and it was readily apparent in the side by side. Colors were definitely the highlight though. Because you have more luminance for color individually (especially blue) you see far more pronounced colors. This was abundantly clear throughout almost every demo.

The bad news, it still looks like most of the CE companies are going the HDR10 route, which is essentially a hodgepodge solution that can be implemented however they want rather than the standard and VERY obvious benefits that Dolby Vision brings to HDR. All because they are wary of paying the licensing fees. So right now we have worst case scenario for HDR with HDR10. It also continually looks like the benefits for projection systems is going to be nearly non-existant, especially if the content ends up being HDR10 with no metadata for remapping to lower peak display brightness capabilities.

So while I've seen what could be, and it looked pretty fantastic, from what I was told at the demonstration from the guys at Spectracal, the future of HDR presently looks a bit grim and a little wild west. Hopefully it turns out better in the long run, but it only furthered my pessimistic outlook.

[elwaylite]

Figured as much.

Ive been talking with Chad B over my last two calibrations and he has been discussing HDR and 4K patterns for calibration and that Spectracal was getting ready. Hope there is a little more out there to work with because I intend on getting my new UHD set touched up when players and movies start hitting.

[Desk.]

Originally Posted by Kris Deering

Got the chance to attend a nice presentation from the folks at Spectracal yesterday at their offices. They set up two of the new Vizio 65" Reference series monitors. On one they were playing the Dolby Vision 4K HDR content available on VUDU with the display calibrated to the Dolby Golden Standard at about 600 nits. On the other they had the same movie playing from a Blu-ray with the monitor calibrated to 100 nits with a 3D LUT box ensuring perfect REC 709 calibration.

Some takeaways, the biggest benefit I saw from HDR was the color and detail. Because you see less clipping in areas, fine details were preserved nicely and it was readily apparent in the side by side. Colors were definitely the highlight though. Because you have more luminance for color individually (especially blue) you see far more pronounced colors. This was abundantly clear throughout almost every demo.

The bad news, it still looks like most of the CE companies are going the HDR10 route, which is essentially a hodgepodge solution that can be implemented however they want rather than the standard and VERY obvious benefits that Dolby Vision brings to HDR. All because they are wary of paying the licensing fees. So right now we have worst case scenario for HDR with HDR10. It also continually looks like the benefits for projection systems is going to be nearly non-existant, especially if the content ends up being HDR10 with no metadata for remapping to lower peak display brightness capabilities.

So while I've seen what could be, and it looked pretty fantastic, from what I was told at the demonstration from the guys at Spectracal, the future of HDR presently looks a bit grim and a little wild west. Hopefully it turns out better in the long run, but it only furthered my pessimistic outlook.

I'm in the market for a 4K HDR OLED TV next year, which will come with HDMI 2.0a and a colour space approaching Rec 2020.

What implications does the situation around HDR described above have on my potential purchase?

Is that 2016 set's connectivity a reasonable guarantee of future-proofing, or with the sands still shifting could I find myself soon locked out of a future HDR standard?

Desk

[Kris Deering]

Originally Posted by Desk.

I'm in the market for a 4K HDR OLED TV next year, which will come with HDMI 2.0a and a colour space approaching Rec 2020.

What implications does the situation around HDR described above have on my potential purchase?

Is that 2016 set's connectivity a reasonable guarantee of future-proofing, or with the sands still shifting could I find myself soon locked out of a future HDR standard?

Desk

With HDR still up in the air due to essentially a format war, I don't know if there is a true FUTURE PROOF solution on the market today. But this only applies to the HDR side of things. For 4K and such you will probably be fine. While content will indeed come in a REC2020 container, it is expected that most of the content for awhile will still only be P3 inside that container, so as long as your display supports the P3 gamut, you're covered for the near future.

This is consumer electronics though. There is never anything that is absolutely future proof if you want to be at or near the bleeding edge of display tech. And with HDR it may be a year or two before the dust settles and we have a better idea on who is going to use what and how it will be implemented on different displays.

[elwaylite]

Main reason I went ahead and went with a nice 4K LED LCD this year, with plans for a large screen OLED in a couple of years after more sorts out. OLED also needs a little more maturity time IMO.

I've been thru the many generations of panny plasma issues, not willing to go there again.

[Desk.]

Originally Posted by elwaylite

Main reason I went ahead and went with a nice 4K LED LCD this year, with plans for a large screen OLED in a couple of years after more sorts out. OLED also needs a little more maturity time IMO.

I've been thru the many generations of panny plasma issues, not willing to go there again.

Not to go too far off topic, but I tried LCD and couldn't tolerate a display which, to me, is inferior in too many ways to a technology that is now 90 years old - CRT.

I've been following the evolution of OLED closely for years, and judge that next year it'll be ready for prime time. Future-proofing as best as possible for the likes of HDR is my only remaining concern.

Desk

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Desk.

But how is it 'dangerous' to make an assumption that a title will be released?
Desk

There’s dangerous and there’s dangerous…. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...029-story.html

[elwaylite]

Originally Posted by Desk.

Not to go too far off topic, but I tried LCD and couldn't tolerate a display which, to me, is inferior in too many ways to a technology that is now 90 years old - CRT.

I've been following the evolution of OLED closely for years, and judge that next year it'll be ready for prime time. Future-proofing as best as possible for the likes of HDR is my only remaining concern.

Desk

I was an LCD hater too, and this isnt the first one I owned. Owned 4 Panny plasmas, one Samsung plasma, and sold a VT50 for this XBR. Other than view angle, I love the hell out of the image this calibrated XBR gives and I watch movies in a pitch black room (did the same with the VT50). Now I fully get OLED contrast ratio is second to none, and I think it will do HDR better than LCD which is why I intend on owning one in the future. For now though, they have some issues and Ill take my XBR especially considering the price difference.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Kris Deering

Got the chance to attend a nice presentation from the folks at Spectracal yesterday at their offices. They set up two of the new Vizio 65" Reference series monitors. On one they were playing the Dolby Vision 4K HDR content available on VUDU with the display calibrated to the Dolby Golden Standard at about 600 nits. On the other they had the same movie playing from a Blu-ray with the monitor calibrated to 100 nits with a 3D LUT box ensuring perfect REC 709 calibration.

Some takeaways, the biggest benefit I saw from HDR was the color and detail.

Perceived detail (i.e. HDR contrast ratio) aside. How was the real detail (sharpness) of the streaming content, which I assume was of lower bit rate) as opposed to the Blu-ray (1080p) content?

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Kris Deering

...display calibrated to the Dolby Golden Standard at about 600 nits.

Proprietary formats aside, testing (yet to be published) shows an improved quality of experience up to 1500 nits, after which the perceived (by real world observers) value drops off significantly so as to make the *wow* or bang for the buck (engineering costs) to go up to even higher luminance capable consumer TVs not really worth it for manufacturers.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Kris Deering

VERY obvious benefits that Dolby Vision brings to HDR. All because they are wary of paying the licensing fees. So right now we have worst case scenario for HDR with HDR10

Were these obvious benefits shown (proven)? Or was this a demo simply (only) to show the superiority of HDR over SDR rather than proving to unbiased observers (with typical movie content rather than Barten theorem and such) that with a consumer level TV, that Dolby Vision is superior to HDR10?

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Kris Deering

While content will indeed come in a REC2020 container, it is expected that most of the content for awhile will still only be P3 inside that container, so as long as your display supports the P3 gamut, you're covered for the near future.

(bolding by moi)
Which is good, as using an oversize color space container serves as a way to massage the chroma distortion artifacts.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Desk.

...downloads.

Speaking of which, free (under the Creative Commons License , here be several clips to keep folks occupied……
http://fourkay.cablelabs.com/

With regards to having your cake and eating it too (4K and HDR), see the red font at the bottom right of each page….
http://fourkay.cablelabs.com/video/life-untouched/
http://fourkay.cablelabs.com/video/eldorado/

Of Note: Given that some of thee above content qualified as source material for the materials and methods portion of the investigation of HDR deployment by a multi-billion dollar corporation, then I’d say it’s of good enough quality to merit a look-see.

P.S.
The very last preview clip (bottom row, left) should eventually get fixed when people gets the time.

[Kris Deering]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Perceived detail (i.e. HDR contrast ratio) aside. How was the real detail (sharpness) of the streaming content, which I assume was of lower bit rate) as opposed to the Blu-ray (1080p) content?

You could tell the difference side by side, but with HDR enabled and the obvious benefits of it, it was hard to tell what was a benefit from the 4K stream resolution or the HDR. Obviously if I had more time with the setup I would have tried a lot of different options to try and narrow down what was responsible for what. But overall the image looked more detailed. But there were also obvious banding and compression noise in the image that wasn't there in the Blu-ray. Not horrible, but easy to spot.

[Kris Deering]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Proprietary formats aside, testing (yet to be published) shows an improved quality of experience up to 1500 nits, after which the perceived (by real world observers) value drops off significantly so as to make the *wow* or bang for the buck (engineering costs) to go up to even higher luminance capable consumer TVs not really worth it for manufacturers.

Given the brightness gains are logarithmic I would expect as much. As you go farther up the actual increase in perceived brightness gets more and more subtle.

[Kris Deering]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Were these obvious benefits shown (proven)? Or was this a demo simply (only) to show the superiority of HDR over SDR rather than proving to unbiased observers (with typical movie content rather than Barten theorem and such) that with a consumer level TV, that Dolby Vision is superior to HDR10?

Not shown unfortunately. They didn't have any HDR10 material to show. But this was information gleened from their two head image engineers based on the work they've been doing with studios, manufacturers and with the standards stuff. They said HDR10 could possibly be a good solution if some standardization came into play, but at this point everyone is just doing their own thing and without proper metadata and such, the results will probably be less than ideal. I'm sure at some point we'll be able to do more comparisons of the two formats.

[Geoff D]

Heh. Perhaps I should be thankful that I would only need a regulation SDR 709 transform from the HDR P3 encode, as it seems increasingly likely that whatever implementation any 'HDR' TV uses will be in the lap of the gods as to how it's mapped to that particular display.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Speaking of which, free (under the Creative Commons License , here be several clips to keep folks occupied……
http://fourkay.cablelabs.com/

With regards to having your cake and eating it too (4K and HDR), see the red font at the bottom right of each page….
http://fourkay.cablelabs.com/video/life-untouched/
http://fourkay.cablelabs.com/video/eldorado/

Of Note: Given that some of thee above content qualified as source material for the materials and methods portion of the investigation of HDR deployment by a multi-billion dollar corporation, then I’d say it’s of good enough quality to merit a look-see.

P.S.
The very last preview clip (bottom row, left) should eventually get fixed when people gets the time.

The HDR clips play on my Sony set but alas, they look completely washed out and there's no way to correct it. Damn 2014 4K TV, grumble grumble harumph harumph...

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Kris Deering

Not shown unfortunately. They didn't have any HDR10 material to show.

Not difficult to do/get these days.
If Dolby were to prove it by kicking butt in such a shootout [Dolby Vision (12bit with dynamic metadata) vs. HDR10 (10bit with static metadata)] and word gets out to the AV journalistic world, perhaps those licensing fees would become more palatable to some consumer television manufacturers.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

The HDR clips play on my Sony set but alas, they look completely washed out and there's no way to correct it. Damn 2014 4K TV, grumble grumble harumph harumph...

My friend I feel your early adopter pain….at least you have the eagle.