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3D and 4K were nothing! It's all about HDR now!
Netflix has confirmed it has begun its rollout of high dynamic range content on its TV and film streaming service. HDR videos display millions more shades of colour and extra levels of brightness than normal ones, allowing images to look more realistic.
However, to view them members will need a new type of TV or monitor and a premium-priced Netflix subscription. Some HDR content had already been available via Amazon's rival Instant Video service. Ultra-high-definition 4K Blu-ray discs - which launched in the UK earlier this week - also include HDR data.
Netflix's support follows January's creation of a scheme defining the HDR standards a television set must meet to be marketed with an "Ultra HD Premium" sticker. [...] The US firm recommends its members have at least a 25 megabits per second connection to view them.
High-dynamic-range imaging at Wikipedia.
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(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @03:38AM
As a gamedev, I need to tell you about HDR. HDR isn't what TFA implies it is.
HDR is a method of encoding a highly dynamic range of light values. Think of a picture. Instead of having RGB from 0-255, we have a floating point value for each R,G,B value. Now, let's say 0.0 is no saturation (0 in the 0-255) and 1.0 is full saturation (255 in the 0-255 range). Now, imagine that instead of capping the values at 1.0, we instead allow light sources contribute as much light as they want -- even having trillions above 1.0 as valid lighting values.
In standard rendering the 0-255 range is a fixed mapping to the floating point 0 to 1 scale. However, in HDR the range is mapped to a dynamic function. So, in very low light settings you could have 0 being the min (0) and 0.25 being the max (255). We would create a function that takes the average saturation of the screen and applies a range around this. Then over time we adjust the scale of ranges to emulate what happens when your eyes adjust to the dark. You enter a dark corridor and everything appears black, but we then make the lower light levels map to 255 and you can see in the dark after the adjustment period. The same goes for walking out into the brightness. There the lighting could average 50.0 and so we might scale everything below 25 to an output of 0 and everything above 100 to output 255. When you first walk outside everything is too bright to distinguish from white, but then the range is dynamically adjusted to this higher value, and you can see.
We can even set the visible intensity spectrum to a minimum / maximum range, and then enable "thermal vision" mode by setting the HDR to ramp up the non-visible range. Then we just have heat sources contribute to the lighting equation. To indicate the thermal vision mode we may force the output to gray-scale and then tint it green.
However, it is important to note that all of these caluclations are performed BEFORE the data ever hits your screen. "HDR" is being used as a buzzword now to push new TVs with greater contrast ratios, but the reality is that your video player (or codec software) could perform the same HDR calculation I just told you about. Thus, summing the HDR output to a visible range of output. Furthermore, the HDR processing could be done in production of the video rather than realtime (since videos are not interactive games).
The TV itself does not have a "highly dynamic range". No. It has a fixed range of contrast, brightness and pixel change latency. It's not like the pixels magically become capable of displaying brighter colors on demand. Their range is fixed. There is no such thing as a TV with High Dynamic Range. HDR is a video processing / rendering technique that allows you to record a large range of lighting values and then set your "f-stop" / exposure length on the fly later. It has nothing to do with hardware, but everything to do with software. HDR is a "muh graphics!" gaming buzzword (hint: so is "3D" and "VR"), but unlike "High Resolution" (or "high definition" HD), HDR has nothing to do with the physical properties of the screen.
HDR may be a nicer screen, but there's no reason you can't view HDR content on a shitty old CRT -- The whole fucking point of HDR was to allow displays that aren't capable of being as bright as the sun to be EMULATED by dynamically adjusting the visible color range.
TL;DR: Don't buy into HDR hype. It's a bogus marketing buzword applied incorrectly, and is as meaningless as "hypoallergenic" or "synergistic".
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @03:51AM
Amendment: HDR as used in TV marketing just refers to greater than 8bits of sensitivity per color channel. This means the STATIC (not dynamic) range of values displayed can be something other than 0-255 per channel. However, in moving content the human eye can not differentiate between individual values delineated in the 256 levels per component range (which is one reason why it's stuck around so long).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @05:20AM
No. You've got a lot wrong.
HDR in televisions is more than just increased color precision. It is also increased color gamut, i.e. more colors beyond what non-HDR tvs can display. Related and in addition to that it also refers to increased contrast through increased brightness. For example a typical TV might have a maximum brightness of 100 nits while a top of the line tv with Dolby Vision would have a peak brightness of 4,000 nits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @05:36AM
increased color precision. It is also increased color gamut
No, you're being a retard. Precision = more bits. Gamut = more bits. It is the same.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Sunday April 17 2016, @10:13AM
You are the retard. You can have a greater gamut [wikipedia.org] with the same number of pixels, and the same gamut with a higher number of pixels. The gamut describes the range of colours you can display, while the precision describes how small variations of colours you can display.
The gamut is related to the physical properties of the display. The highest gamut you'd get if you used three suitable monochromatic light sources for your pixels. Of course you can emulate a display of a strictly lower gamut with a display of a strictly higher gamut. However note that the gamuts naturally have only a partial order; in principle you could have a low-gamut display that can display some colours which a high-gamut display cannot display.
Also, you probably still have the illusion that your RGB monitor can show all existing colours. It can't. Contrary to what you often read, you cannot generate all colours from just three base colours. In particular, no spectral colour can be mixed from other colours.
The reason RGB monitors work anyway is that they can give you a sufficiently large range of colours that you can live with it. The remaining colours are mapped into the closest supported colour.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday April 17 2016, @10:59AM
Here I of course meant "bits" instead of "pixels".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @10:04AM
Ummm... Increase the Dynamic Range of your TV Today! Just send $15.95 plus $7.95 shipping and handling and we will show you how to adjust a magic parameter called "Contrast"!
Gotta be true! It was said in front of a TV camera and through a Microphone!