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March 31, 2016
By Bob O'Donnell
FOSTER CITY, Calif. — When it comes to TVs, the mantra is simple. It’s the picture quality, stupid.
But life in the real world isn’t always that easy. There are many different factors that can influence what your eyes actually perceive when they’re looking at various TV screens. Sure, the quality of the TV itself probably has the biggest influence, but the quality of the source material plays a nearly equal role.
Each of these elements, in turn, is influenced by a number of supporting pieces. On the TV side, there’s the type of technology used (LCD, OLED, etc.), the screen resolution, color range, contrast ratio and much more. On the content side, quality goes all the way back to how the material was first recorded, edited, encoded and stored, and then the means of distribution. Even the bandwidth of a network connection if the source is being streamed.
Frankly, it’s enough to confuse just about everyone.
Thankfully, the TV and content industries have recognized the challenge and are working on means to make things simpler. Even better, the fruits of those efforts are just starting to come to market. The problem is, there are a few of these consumer-friendly monikers that vendors are now using.
Probably the biggest effort comes from the UHD (Ultra High Definition) Alliance — a group of more than 35 consumer electronics, broadcast and film production companies — and it’s called UltraHD Premium.
The original work on the alliance and its logo program — meaning products that meet the certification can carry the UltraHD Premium logo on their packaging — started at CES 2015 and at this year’s CES, the logo became official. The UltraHD standard covers TVs and BluRay players on the hardware side, and recorded and streamed video on the content side.
Dolby has come up with a somewhat similar certification program of its own that it calls Dolby Vision, which also has a logo. Finally, some companies, notably Sony, are sticking with labeling of their own. In Sony’s case, it's using 4K HDR.
Despite the potential confusion, what unites all of these different efforts is not just an increase in resolution to 4K — more than four times the resolution of standard HD — but improvements in the quality of each of those 4 million pixels. Specifically, the visual improvements involve two key elements: a higher dynamic range between light and dark signals, hence HDR, and a broader range of colors — sometimes called a wider color gamut.
Together, the greatly improved contrast ratio offered by HDR and the increase to more than 1 billion possible colors, thanks to what’s called 10-bit color, offer a visually noticeable improvement even over standard 4K TVs.
Arguably the HDR and color gamut features are much more important to overall picture quality than the resolution increase of 4K because they can be seen from any distance on any size screen. Appreciating the resolution enhancements of 4K alone, on the other hand, often requires an uncomfortably up-close glance at a large screen.
That’s why the recent introduction of these enhanced UHD (Ultra HD) specs, which combine both 4K resolution along with HDR and a 10-bit (or higher) color gamut, is a bigger deal than the introduction of 4K. (To be clear, not all 4K or even UHD TVs feature HDR or a wider color range. You need to specifically look for those features.) The new TVs that meet these specs from vendors like LG, Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, Vizio and others offer stunning images, particularly when combined with new Ultra HD Premium or Dolby Vision-logo’d content.
Of course, to get the full impact, you need to be on the lookout for high-resolution audio capable components (sometimes called HD Audio), as well as Dolby’s new Atmos audio surround specification support as well. That way you’ll get sound quality that matches the visuals.
Even better, many companies are combining increasingly sophisticated smarts into their new UHD TVs. Chinese brand, TCL, for example, just announced they will be offering a series of Roku TVs, which incorporates all the capabilities of a standalone Roku Smart TV box. In particular, the company has announced a Dolby Vision enabled unit called the X1 that’s expected to be released later this year.
If you’ve been living with a standard HDTV for some time, you might want to check out the brand-new UHD+HDR offerings just becoming available. Your eyes will thank you.
USA TODAY columnist Bob O'Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, a market research and consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. His clients are major technology firms including Microsoft, HP, Dell, and Nvidia. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech.
Here's a link to the original column: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/03/31/forget-4k-s-time-ultra-hd/82440024/ |
