Me thinks there is too much emphasis here on 4K and the role it may play in
driving the transition to HDR and Wide Color Gamut.
Rather than talking about conversion of SDR to HDR, perhaps we should be
thinking about the other direction...
I'm not talking about creating SDR output for lower quality displays.
I'm talking about creating high quality HDR/WCG images for ALL DISPLAYS.
Digital cinema projection may have been the first commercial market to bring
HDR/WCG to mass audiences, but it's a small niche. Consumer TVs are a much
larger market, but it is unclear that the masses are rushing out to upgrade
their HDTV displays.
For the most part, 4K displays have been a gimmick, more pixels, but no
substantial improvement in picture quality. HDR/WCG provides a more noticeable
improvement in delivered picture quality at ANY resolution.
We are almost there in terms of eliminating the legacy dominance that video has
had over display technology.
Interlace was proven to be a cheap compression trick for analog television, and
Rec 709 an unnecessary limitation on color Gamut rooted in the history of CRT
phosphors. Non integer frame rates live on, for no obvious reason, but variable
frame rates and temporal oversampling are now common tools used for image
acquisition.
The reality is that the video industry is no longer driving this train. The
"vision" behind TV and cinematic entertainment is too limiting: video is just
one of many things we consume on displays today, and more time is spent looking
at smartphones and tablets than TVs for many of us. And most of that time is
not spent watching video.
It is noteworthy that Apple is leading the tech industry with adoption of HDR
and WCG in a growing range of products. The new iPhone 7's, iPad Pro (9.7"),
and MacBook Pros all offer HDR/WCG displays. More important, the internal
processing pipelines for virtually all Apple product now support 16 bit samples.
This goes well beyond the 8, 10, or 12 bit samples that Mike was asking about -
video for the masses is still stuck at 8bits with MPEG-2 compression
technology. Our mobile devices are capable of far more!
HDTV was a big deal when this group started online discussions. It was very
expensive too. But HDTV did not enable a resurrection of the video industry -
just the opposite. It has been in steep decline for two decades.
Perhaps one major reason is that the barrier to competition from the rapidly
growing tech industry that many expected HDTV to be, turned out to be a barrier
to innovation for the video industry. Who, in 1996, was thinking that everyone
would have an HDTV camera in their pocket today? That we would all be sharing
HD quality video delivered over wired and wireless data networks?
Or that a phone would deliver the advantages of HDR/WCG image acquisition and
display, while most of what is left of the video industry is just talking about
it?
As we enter the "Black Friday" buying season, it may be worth asking an
important question.
Which is more important; the fidelity and accuracy of the display on the device
you are using to purchase Christmas gifts online, or the fidelity and accuracy
of the entertainment video you watch on that display?
Regards
Craig
On Nov 10, 2016, at 2:58 PM, cooleman@xxxxxx wrote:
BTW, the autoconversion by BCOM that Mark told us about looking horrible at
the Harmonic NAB booth, looked good at IBC. The research director told me the
issue at NAB was with the consumer display used, they behave unpredictable.
So at IBC the French used a commercial 32" Sony LCD and the BVM X300
Reference OLED studio monitor.
Manfredi, Albert E schreef op 10-11-2016 20:26:
Here's a paper that more directly answers that question.----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.a2zlogix.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Whitepaper-A2Zlogix-Shows-SDR-to-HDR-Upconversion.pdf
(Of course, all of the examples in the paper are being viewed in SDR.
The pictures pretending to show HDR are merely good SDR, and those
showing SDR are just worse than what SDR can offer.)
Bert
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