From the official European Broadcasting Union EBU website comes the news that HDR in some form is being seriously considered for future UHDTV broadcasts.
Hosted by German EBU Member IRT, they recently hosted a day-long workshop that included demonstrations of what HDR can achieve when used either simply as a feature of the television display processing, or as a results of special measures in the broadcast signal.
Using High Dynamic Range (HDR) in future Ultra High Definition Television services may result in images showing “All the wonderfulness – and all the scenery flaws”. That was one of the conclusions participants at the EBU-DVB workshop on HDR may have gone home with.
The dynamic range of a television image is loosely the ratio of the lightest to the darkest part of the image. The dynamic range of television images today is very much less than that we experience in the real world. The sense of realism of television images will be improved if we expand the dynamic range to be closer to that we experience in our daily life. There are a number of ways of providing HDR, and over the coming months broadcasters will need to decide on the value of HDR, and the best technology to provide it.
The workshop provided details on the implication of HDR for programme production and delivery to the home, which will be valuable not only to the 80 specialists who attended the event, but also to the EBU to help decide on a policy for UHDTV. The critical issue at the moment is what degree of quality leap forward will be needed for UHDTV to be successful with the public. The indications of the workshop were that the measures in UHDTV should include HDR.
It is certainly watch this space with 4K signals rolling out and 8K transmissions being tested and now HDR may be part of that picture.
We will leave you with a saying the EBU has said in the past “Who will win………. hopefully the viewer”