TALKING HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE

Bill Mandel, co-manager at HDR10+ Technologies, provides an update on the HDR10+ format

- BOB ANKOSKO

ULTRA-HIGH resolution 8K is in the wings but 4K Ultra HD (UHD) is what most of us watch day in and day out, whether we're streaming a movie over Netflix, spinning a Blu-ray Disc, or watching TV in one of its many forms. The splendor of 4K extends well beyond its 8 million-pixel resolution, offering several noticeable advancements in picture quality over standard high-definition (HD). Wide color gamut, or WCG, enables your 4K television to display a broader palette of colors, making images more vibrant and realistic. If you're into videogames and action/adventure blockbusters or sports, 4K's higher frame rates make fast-moving images appear smoother and more lifelike. And then there's high dynamic range (HDR), arguably the most significant of the advancements, which brings images closer to real life by revealing a wider range of contrast on compatible TVs.

Simply put, HDR enables the brightest areas of an image to look brighter and the darkest areas to look darker, while allowing for more nuanced detail and gradations in dark areas, particularly shadows, and better delineation of shapes and objects. In more technical terms, HDR holds the potential of enabling us to see not just highlights but the entire range of dark-to-light tonal values, or what cinematographers and video professionals call "grayscale."

The thing is, like so many other wonderful A/V technologies that have been introduced over the years, there is more than one HDR technical standard. HDR10, the standard announced by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) in 2015, is the most common form of HDR. With widespread support across a broad range of industry organizations, content providers, and devices from TVs and video projectors to streaming media players, PCs, and videogame consoles-HDR10 has evolved into the de facto standard, due in large part to it being "open" and free of licensing fees.