Modern technologies are so firmly embedded in our lives that it is sometimes difficult to understand all their diversity. For example, when choosing a TV, you will have to pay attention to many parameters, some of which may puzzle an unprepared buyer. In this article, we will talk about HDR technology, which has become extremely relevant in the last years.
In practice, its implementation until the beginning of 2016 was the prerogative of individual TV models, and the corresponding content was catastrophically small. Fortunately, during the year, the situation began to change: more and more manufacturers are equipping their TVs with HDR support. Game console manufacturers have also introduced support for the technology in the updated models. Sony went even further and included HDR support in the original PlayStation 4 by updating the software. This fact was especially appreciated by young people, like students who like gaming. On top of that, students make great use of Essays Writing Help where they can get help with their studies.
The most important thing is that suitable content has appeared and continues to appear that can be revealed on devices with HDR support.
So is all this fuss about HDR worth investing buyers ‘ money incompatible hardware?
What does it look like?
Let’s try to understand and start by explaining the essence of the technology.
Any TV is characterized by indicators of contrast and color accuracy. Contrast affects how bright and dark colors the device will be able to display, keeping them distinguishable for the viewer. The accuracy of the color rendering, in turn, means how close to the real shades will be displayed on the screen.
Interestingly, most potential buyers, if they are offered a choice of a TV with a higher resolution and a TV with a lower resolution, but higher contrast, will choose the second one. It is the saturation and variety of colors that are the priority when choosing. Thus, the brightness of the image remains preferable to the resolution above 4K. Buyers choose with their eyes.
What’s the point?
HDR (High Dynamic Range) technology, or extended dynamic range, makes the choice described above even more obvious: it makes light colors even lighter, and dark colors darker. HDR increases the color range and maximum contrast, which makes the image deeper and richer. The standard colors-red, blue, and green-get additional shades and their combinations, which directly affect the image quality.
Hand in hand with HDR is the WCG (Wide Color Gamut) technology. The latter further expands the available set of colors. Viewers who have never encountered these technologies before will be pleasantly surprised by how much the number of shades of the same seemingly familiar colors increases.
It is important to understand that the technology of HDR, implemented in modern TVs and connected devices, is very different from what has been present in the cameras of our smartphones for some time.
For example, the HDR TV technology increases the contrast and the palette of available colors to make the image on the screen more realistic, to show it in natural colors. The HDR technology in cameras, in turn, is used to combine multiple images into one to get the best image, which combines the most successful elements of all the frames taken. Thus, the difference between the two HDR turns out to be fundamental.
How is it implemented?
the technology consists of two integral parts: the display and the content.
The TV is the simplest part of the two. It is required to be able to highlight certain areas of the screen more vividly than its regular counterpart, which does not have HDR support.
Everything is much more complicated in the case of content that must have HDR support to display an extended dynamic range on the screen. Most of the movies, many of the TV series made in the last decade, have HDR support. It can also be added without any artificial inclusions in the original image. The fact is that the main obstacle to the way of HDR content to your TV is exclusively data transmission.
Videos created using extended dynamic range are compressed to then be transmitted to your TV, computer, or another device. As a result, the user sees at best the image that his display is trying to reproduce using the technologies and systems built into it to improve the image quality.
This way, only content from certain sources will be displayed with true HDR, because your TV will receive additional metadata that will tell it exactly how to display each specific scene. Of course, this means that the playback device supports the technology.In addition, there are certain requirements for the equipment. Not only your TV but also your player or set-top box must have an HDMI connector version of at least 2.0. Most of the equipment released from 2015 to the present has support for the HDMI 2.0 standard, which can be programmatically updated to HDMI 2.0 a. The latest version of the standard is required to transmit the very metadata mentioned above.
At the same time, manufacturers have already decided to assign a UHD Premium certificate to TVs that support 4K resolution and HDR technology. Its presence is worth paying attention to when buying. It’s also worth noting that the 4K Blu-ray format also has HDR support by default.
To sum up
Of course, the technology of HDR in TVs is not yet as vital as it is presented by manufacturers, but it is now the main driving force in the industry. The race for a resolution higher than 4K has faded into the background, giving way to an expanded dynamic range.
Although the best result will be achieved by combining the two advanced standards, at this stage it is preferable to choose a TV with HDR support, if you are not willing to overpay for having a higher resolution than 4K. The quality of the image when using the appropriate content will pleasantly surprise you in any case. You can’t fool your eyes: brighter and richer colors, as well as their variety, will be preferable to having an ultra-high-resolution matrix.