Thanks. I didn't understand that you don't actually own an OLED. I have an LED and I turn down the local dimming as low as it will go because I actually don't like perfect blacks. Way back when HDR displays were something that only existied in laboratories, I did some experiments of my own by making color prints on transparency film and stacking them. This dramatically increased the contrast. 3 prints stacked was very striking on a lightboard in a darkened room. But, it looked kind of crushy, very similar to what OLEDs and mini LEDs look like today. I needed to soften the pictures to get them to look more natural, but then what's the point of all that extra contrast capacity? The answer turned out to be getting much, much more light behind the high contrast picturess. When I was able to get diffused sunlight behind these transparancies, they quit looking overly contrasty and became very natural and lifelike looking. The dark areas became filled with detail even though the bright areas had gone up just as much. It became very dynamic and less contrasty looking. A field of flowers in sunlight looked practically perfect, it was literally taking my breath away it was so right looking. So, I hold that with my TV's limited peak brightness of 1500 nits it can't support super high contrast and actually look good. Dynamic looking and contrasty looking are very different perceptions. Perfect blacks capability is not necessarily a problem, but typically not all that helpful in my opinion. There needs to be a natural noise floor of some kind, and tone mapping of some kind of "S" curve into the picture to get a natural look at lower lighting levels. This has been know forever in photography, where prints are typically limted to about 300:1 contrast ratio. To look good, photography exposes with an exposure shoulder that's natural to the media with film, and has to be properly applied with digital. If an OLED or mini LED can do near perfect blacks, that's not necessarily a problem. But content creators with good taste should rarely ever let any part of the scene get too dark when they know the display can't get very bright, so the black capability is not all that useful unless you want to intenionall use it as an artisitc effect. I think they do use, and I often don't like the look they're going for. The stuff that does look good to me doesn't rely on the perfect black levels. There are some rare cases like flowers in a studio or vases or whatever you see on jet black backgrounds used for demo material. That is quite striking but I think even that stuff all looks better when they have some kind of diffuse lighting in the background rather than jet black.
32,000 nits – luminance of white card illuminated by sunlight+skylight at noon on a clear day
320 nits – luminance of diffuse white rendered by a typical consumer TV
32 nits – luminance of typical diffuse white in cinema
3.2 nits – the light from a single candle at 1 foot distance
No TV is capable of this dynamic range. I'm not even sure we have cameras that can capture it.
I recently had the opportunity to attend a workshop with Charles Poynton, a renowned mathematician and video expert. The informal workshop took place in New York with just a few others, providing a great opportunity to listen and discuss hot button issue around High Dynamic Range (HDR). Poynton...
www.insightmedia.info
And then on the PQ EOTF curve.
by Chris Chinnock, Insight Media This topic of discussion started as an email thread in the HDR work group of the International Committee of Display Metrology (ICDM) and then sparked a long discussion in the recent face-to-face meeting in Mt. View, California. Per agreement with ICDM, they...
www.insightmedia.info
Modern TVs use a lot of processing, including curves, including noise models, to deliver the picture.
The issue as I see it is that TVs are mass market devices. The most expensive TVs are usually about furniture and decor and aren't necessarily the best performers. As it is with the most expensive speakers. However, with speakers you have full access to the same tools that engineers use in studios to do their work, and they are relatively inexpensive, easy to setup and play.
With TVs, mastering monitors run tens of thousands of USD and the very best are not available for casual purchase at all. Most have fairly small displays as well, but are heavy and thick. Even if you do buy one, and I was considering doing just that to avoid the panel lottery and reliability issues, these are professional tools, and not consumer-friendly. As far as I know you have to manually select colorspace and other elements when using them, and they have no HDCP compatibility, and usually require special connections.
The more technical consumer will not be able to afford good display measurement gear, while excellent lab-worthy measurement microphones, although not cheap, are affordable.
Say you do measure the TV. Calibration only goes so far and some processing features are not open to be manipulated.
If there was ever an example of gatekeeping, it's with TVs.
Fortunately or unfortunately I've done enough work to understand display flaws, and the only conclusion I've reached is that I would rather be slightly grumpy as I watch a cheap display then buy an expensive TV I would consider artifically crippled by mass market considerations and manufacturing.
Maybe it's why I prefer audio.
www.rtings.com
