Category Archives: Infographics

2018 World Cup: Watching in 4K HDR makes a difference

Posted on by
7

Color survey of the Top 10 World Cup countries for 2018

The 2018 World Cup is officially underway with a blowout victory for host country Russia today.

Over the next month, an estimated 3.4 billion (according to GlobalWebIndex) soccer fans will have an opportunity to watch World Cup games in 4K resolution with High Dynamic Range (HDR) and a wider palette of colors. This means the experience of watching the games on TV will be much closer to being at the stadium in person.

It’s likely to make a big difference. The World Cup is one of the most colorful sporting events on TV with teams from 32 countries, thousands of flag-waving fans and, of course, wildly colorful cleats.

To get a sense of how impactful the change from HDTV to 4K HDR might be for World Cup soccer, I did a quick survey of the country colors for the 2018 World Cup’s top 10 teams according to CBS Sports’ most recent ranking.

World Cup 2018 Top 10 Teams Color Gamut

Color gamut of the 2018 World Cup’s top 10 countries. 

With a mix of publicly available data and a little math, I was able to plot the dominant flag colors for the top 10 World Cup countries into the CIE 1931 color space (if you are new to reading color space charts, check out our primer here). Note that I limited the survey to flag colors since data on 2018 uniforms was incomplete and flag colors seem to be featured on most uniforms. I’ve also only plotted the two most dominant or most ‘colorful’ colors, ignoring blacks, whites and grays.

The results were a little bit surprising. Based on this data, just two teams entire flags – Argentina and France – can be accurately displayed on a standard HDTV with the BT.709 color gamut. This means fans with wide color gamut sets will finally be able to see their county’s colors in their full glory when viewing a 4K HDR broadcast.

It’s a great example of the power of HDR and wide color gamut to deliver a lifelike experience that really makes you feel like you are there in the stands in Russia sitting next to a crazy face-painted super-fan waving a flag in support of his country (only without the obstructed view from that flag).

How to watch the World Cup in 4K HDR

If you have a 4K HDR-capable set, the World Cup is available to watch in 4K HDR from a variety of sources around the world this year. Here in the US, TV maker Hisense is making 4K HDR games available for streaming in a partnership with Fox while DirecTV, DISH and Comcast are all offering broadcast options.

For a full run-down of all the options I recommend Johnny Archer’s thorough review over at Forbes. He breaks it down by country and gets covers the nitty-gritty differences in broadcast features from each of the providers.

Stay Tuned…

I’ll plan to update this with measured data from actual team uniforms once the field has narrowed a bit more in the semi-final or final rounds.

 

 

Introducing Wide Gamut Wednesdays

Posted on by
2

This week I’m kicking off a new series of posts that set out to answer a simple question:

“Can an HDTV accurately reproduce these colors?”

I’m calling the new weekly feature “Wide Color Gamut Wednesday” or #WideColorWednesday in social media speak. Each week we will analyze a new wide color gamut image and post the results to our @dot_color Twitter feed.

In the process, I think we’ll find that “wide gamut” colors – colors that fall outside the BT.709 color gamut used by HDTVs – are actually fairly common beyond classic examples like Brazilian tree frogs or Coca Cola cans. In fact, in our first test, we found a simple image of spring flowers, taken in Rochester, NY, contained mostly colors that fall outside the BT.709 gamut.

Wide Color Gamut image analysis

62.5% of the colors in this springtime flowers image fall outside the BT.709 color gamut used by HDTVs #WideGamutWednesday

I thought it would be helpful to write up the first #WideColorWednesday image as a blog post with some background on the process used to create these images.

Continue reading →

Can your TV accurately display your favorite NFL team’s colors?

Posted on by
1

Over the weekend I saw this interesting tweet about color gamut and the NFL and I had to find out if it was true:

Could it be that something as simple as an NFL jersey is not within the color gamut of modern HDTVs? I mapped the Broncos team colors onto the CIE 1976 color space along with the HDTV color gamut standard, called rec.709. As you can see, the orange is right on the edge and the blue is indeed outside the gamut.

When we think of high color content, we think of action movies and video games, but this exemplifies how color performance affects everything we see on our TVs, even down to the jersey being worn by our favorite sports team. Luckily high color displays are on their way to fix this problem.  As you can see, the Bronco’s colors fall nicely within the much wider DCI-P3 color gamut.