One of the members of AVSforum drew my attention to HDR (high dynamic range) televisions, which from what i can tell will be coming out in a few years. I can find lots of articles on how HDR works, but I can't find any information on whether HDR is something that is going to be the 'wave of the future' or just a gimmick. Do you guys feel that HDR is vital to having a "perfect TV" or is it largely going to be irrelevant?

Given the fact that capturing, creating and storing HDR pictures has to be sorted out prior to the technology becoming practical.

Think IMAX, some of the best ever moving images captured are only done justice on IMAX or some sort of 4K source. But IMAX and 4K is expensive to process above and beyond the cost of just using a format like 1080/p.

The entire chain from capture to display would have to operate at a much higher level of precision compaired to the current 0-255 or 4096 for rgb it is 0-65,536 so new methods for storing such data, let alone capturing and displaying it have to be fully hedged out.

That said, a HDR display can take current images and display them at a better fidelity than a non HDR display, so if we get The displays first we'll be ready for HDR content.

The upcoming laser-based displays might just be the first practical HDR display on the horizon and HDR will be revelvant but it wont IMHO displace current tech for maybe 10 year since most of the work is just getting ramped up to some sort of HDTV.

Also the move to HDTV is still 2 years out in the US so the question of revelance isn't worth thinking about for atleast 5 years cause the move just to local-dimmed led LCD tvs is just one of the first steps towards HDR and that tech took since 2005 to makes its way to tvs.

check out
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/10/03/brightside_hdr_edr/1

brightside patented alot of HDR tech and this is a great article if you haven't read it yet

Simply put: HDR is a pain in the ass. HDR in PC games is *simulated* with tricks and some higher-bit-depth calculations before the end pixels are given the 0-255 brightness values. This gives you the halo and glare effects in games like FEAR and Halflife2: Lost Coast.

Thinking logically, for "true" HDR reproduction you'd need HDR bightness levels throughout filming and in the end display, you'd need complete light level control (ie, zero light in the room) and a display that can get bright enough to approach the level where the average person would be blinded.

Also relevant: the ability of the human eye to distinguish between 255 levels of brightness is rather poor. I can't imagine 4096 or higher.

Simply put: HDR is a pain in the ass. HDR in PC games is *simulated* with tricks and some higher-bit-depth calculations before the end pixels are given the 0-255 brightness values. This gives you the halo and glare effects in games like FEAR and Halflife2: Lost Coast.

Thinking logically, for "true" HDR reproduction you'd need HDR bightness levels throughout filming and in the end display, you'd need complete light level control (ie, zero light in the room) and a display that can get bright enough to approach the level where the average person would be blinded.

Also relevant: the ability of the human eye to distinguish between 255 levels of brightness is rather poor. I can't imagine 4096 or higher.

Well, FEAR didn't actually use HDR, and Lost Coast didn't have the best quality HDR, but you're basically right. In the games that do use HDR, effects like gun flares and dynamic dimming and brighting (when moving indoors and outdoors) can be simulated by HDR, in other words, it's possible to do these effects without the use of HDR calculations.

I think there's even one more relevant point. Our display technology, no matter what kind of display, from high end plasmas to LCDs or anything, isn't up to the task of reproducing the contrast, or bit depth that HDR is potentially capable of. Rather, it's not even close.

Potentially, we may be able to one day make displays that render a 2d image with contrast so good that the images they display are not different from reality, this takes exceptional image quality and contrast. Right now, even the best displays have a 'glow' to them at all times, but this isn't inherently necessary. This is where HDR displays factor in. The human eye might not be able to tell if a scene is 4 shades brighter or darker, but the full range of brightness necessary for a 'real' image is still nowhere near possible and eventually HDR signals might be important in this way.

In displays, dynamic range simply means the lowest black level against the brightest white level. A CRT is considered to be a HDR display and so is the new Samsung 81 series.

crt are most certanly not HDR. they cannot achive a level of brightness anywhere near what would be needed to convey a "full-range" image. On top of that is the fact that the color gamut of most crt is ~72% of ntsc.

To get the HDR effect a display mould have to display a range of brightness equal or similar to that in real life. Its not just a large contrast ratio that is needed. Its that the displayed black should emit no light and display a range of colors and hues to equal or close the range of human vison.

Since crts don't emit enough light it doesn't matter that they can produce really good black, they are not "HDR"

Laser displays could do HDR since theycan produce a coherent (read one color) light for each or the primary colors (red,green,blue)= huge color range, and black would be no light at all.

OLED,SED and FED all have the potential to be "HDR" displays since black is off= no light and have a large color gamut, but true "HDR" content will take a long time to come along.

That said a "HDR" display will make non "HDR" material look as good as the source material can because the display will not be limiting the range of color or contrast the source contains.

The problem is there is alot of math involved in "HDR" as a whole because of the shear size and amount of data that I aluded to above.

The link in the above post I made goes into great detail about HDR as a whole, and the pictures do help to show what a HDR display looks like side by side with a westinghouse both using the same lcd panel.

From my understanding, CRT can produce dynamic rage up to 35,000:1. So I always considered it to be a high-dynamic-range display.

I know what you guys mean about true HDR but but, displays such as BrightView should be considered as Ultra-High Dynamic Range instead?

Check out this link

http://www.coolhall.com/homepage/pubs/hdrdisp_eval/hdrdisp_project.html

Simply boosting the range of an LDR image linearly to fit the HDR display can equal or even surpass the appearance of a true HDR image. Thus the potentially tricky process of inverse tone mapping can be largely circumvented

Check out this link

http://www.coolhall.com/homepage/pubs/hdrdisp_eval/hdrdisp_project.html

Simply boosting the range of an LDR image linearly to fit the HDR display can equal or even surpass the appearance of a true HDR image. Thus the potentially tricky process of inverse tone mapping can be largely circumvented

That's not what that page said at all. HDR image on HDR display was always best. You can't display a non-altered HDR image on a LDR display.

Inverse tone mapping is important for dynamic images.