How much color do displays really need? Part 4: Content Delivery

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Jeff Yurek

In the previous post in this series, I made the case for displays with hybrid, custom color gamuts as a great way to deliver coverage of Pointer’s gamut as well as the most important broadcast standards. We can build the hardware today to support these large color gamuts so its seems like a great solution but there is a catch: nobody is broadcasting or distributing these large color gamuts today. So, are we going to have to wait for broadcasters and content creators to slowly catchup, much like we did with HDTV?

What content delivery looks like today

Content is captured and viewed in a wide variety of gamuts across a range of different devices but only broadcast in one gamut.

Today, content creators are actually shooting in a wide variety of color spaces ranging from RAW to rec.709 to Adobe 1998. They are then forced to cram all of these different sources into the lowest common denominator rec.709 standard for broadcast or distribution. That same content is then displayed on devices with a range of different gamut capabilities from tablets that only cover about 70% of rec.709 to HDTVs that do meet the spec to OLED devices that oversaturate the content.

There’s a lot of diversity on both the capture and display sides and a clear bottleneck in the middle in the form of broadcast and distribution channels.

Adhering to broadcast standards is no longer sufficient to guarantee a good experience for consumers because there’s already too much diversity on the display side alone to rely on one standard. You just can’t be sure that consumers are actually looking at your content on a rec.709-capable device. We’re also losing a lot of the value that creators are capturing and could, in many cases, be delivered to end viewers who have the devices to show it.

How do we get around broadcast standards?

What content delivery looks like tomorrow

The first thing to note is that the internet is democratizing broadcast and distribution channels. With the web we can deliver whatever we want, whenever we want. Some players in the industry, notably Sony, are already doing this with 4K content. If there’s no content available and you believe in 4K resolution, you just deliver your own content directly to your customers.

Wide color gamut displays combined with good quality color management and the web as a broadcast platform will allow content to accurately be displayed in the correct color gamut.

Wide color gamut displays combined with good color management and the web as a broadcast platform will allow content to accurately be displayed in the original color gamut.

Still, this leaves us with some potential experience problems. If the right display gamut is not matched to the right content the results will be no different and that’s why color management is key. There are several companies working on color management solutions and certification programs for devices that will make it possible for wide color gamut displays to handle a variety of incoming gamuts. Using metadata, for example, a wide color gamut display can be alerted to the presence of Adobe RGB content and then remap that content on the fly to assure that it is displayed accurately on that specific panel.

With great color management, we can maximize the gamut on the display side and pull through the best possible gamut for the device we are looking at. In this way, we can deliver always accurate content that meets the designers intent, wether artistic or commercial.

Apple CEO Tim Cook talks color quality at Goldman Sachs conference

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Jeff Yurek

Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke at Goldman Sachs’ Technology and Internet Conference yesterday. He touched on a wide range of topics from what Apple plans to do with its cash horde to the state of its retail operation. When it came to a question about making lower cost products, Tim used display quality to help make a point about creating great user experiences:

The truth is, customers want a great experience and they want quality and they want that a-ha moment each time that they use the product, and that’s rarely a function of any of those things.

If you look at displays, some people are focused on size. There’s a few other things about the display that are important. Some people use displays, like OLED displays, the color saturation is awful. And so if you ever buy anything online and you want to really know what the color is as many people do, you should really think twice before you depend on the color of the OLED display. The Retina display is twice as bright as an OLED display. I only bring these points up to say there are many attributes to the display, and what Apple does is sweat every detail.

He makes some fair points here. If a display is not bright enough to view in all conditions, not efficient enough to get you through a whole day or accurate enough to display your favorite content, the experience of the whole device suffers. Choosing the right display technology is certainly a critical part of the design process.

OLED technology’s power consumption and saturation issues have been well established already. What I find most interesting in Tim’s comments is the idea that high color saturation is intrinsically a bad experience. It certainly has been that way so far but the difference between a great color experience and the gaudy oversaturation of today’s OLEDs is in exactly the kind of implementation details he’s describing above.

OLED and emerging LCD technologies, like quantum dot displays, can actually show a much wider range of colors than today’s devices– over 40% more of the color that our eyes can detect. This means that, when paired with the right content, high saturation displays can more accurately reflect the world we see around us resulting in a more lifelike, immersive experience.

But how do we get wide color gamut content into consumers hands?

It’s a lot like the chicken and egg/content and technology dilemma facing 4K TV makers with two key differences- wide color gamut can be delivered with no change in file size and there’s plenty content out there already. As an example, movies have been shot for decades on media, both film and digital, that has a much wider color gamut than your TV does today. Much in the same way that 4K TV’s can upscale HD video, it’s also relatively easy to manage the color on a device to make it backwards compatible with today’s content.

OLED implementers have thus far been content to take advantage of the extra pop that added color saturation provides when comparing devices on a store shelf. They’ve left a tremendous amount of overall ecosystem value on the table. It’s possible to deliver video in cinema-level color quality to mobile devices, to offer developers the tools to take full advantage of a wider color palette and to implement accurate color management for existing content. Wide color gamut is ready now, it’s just waiting for the right device maker to come along and put all these pieces together to perfect the experience.

Color at CES 2013

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Jeff Yurek

I’m just wrapping up my visit to CES and it’s been interesting year for display technologies. Amid all the noise about 4K, OLED and 4K-OLED, color performance seems to have quietly worked its way into the conversation. I can’t recall ever having so many relatively technical conversations about color with booth reps from major consumer electronics manufacturers at a CES. It nearly started feeling like a visit to DisplayWeek, that is until I ran into some of the weird, only-at-CES iPhone cases…

I bet we’ll see more color talk next year, especially as 4K content delivery mechanisms and standards begin to mature. In the meantime, these are some of the color-related display stories that caught my eye this week:

Wide gamut content delivery

Sony’s 4K content delivery plans have been one of the most talked about topics here at CES. Less mentioned was Sony’s inclusion of wider color gamut in their standard. Sony reps that I talked to said that both the 1080P Blu-ray disc-based “mastered in 4K” and pure 4K delivery methods would include a wider color gamut. They were not ready to release specifics on gamut size or whether it would meet existing standards like DCI-P3. Still, bringing “expanded color showcasing more of the wide range of rich color contained in the original source” is a move in the right direction for wide gamut.

Color accuracy

Technicolor showed off a color certification program that they hope will incentivize display makers to improve the color accuracy of their panels. Displays that meet or exceed Technicolor’s color specs will get a badge and a copy of partner Portrait Display’s Chroma Tune software, which dynamically controls color gamut to match the application you are using. This means if you open Photoshop on a device with an Adobe RGB 1998 capable display, you’ll get the full, wide gamut. But, if you switch over to watch a YouTube video in your browser, the software will limit the display to rec.709 for the most accurate experience. The advantage was well demonstrated by their e-commerce demo, where a pair of shoes were more accurately depicted on a certified display:

Technicolor’s ecommerce Color Certification demo at CES 2013. The color certified laptop in the middle of the frame more accurately shows the color of the shoes.

Like Sony’s upscaling effort, this kind of technology could help drive wide color gamut adoption by making today’s content compatible with newer displays.

Huge tablets

Panasonic 4K Tablet with sRGB color gamut at CES 2013

Panasonic’s 20 inch 4K/sRGB tablet

Several companies at the show introduced devices in a new class- the 20-plus inch tablet. While there were a lot of hokey multi touch gaming demos (are you really going to play poker with 4 smartphones and a 27″ screen instead of a deck of cards?), the content creation stuff Panasonic showed actually made me think the new form factor shows real promise as a professional tool.

Their tablet, which measures 20 inches on the diagonal, features a 4K IPS panel that covers 100% of the sRGB color gamut standard. Having such a a large canvas with high resolution, accurate color and multi-touch could be great for creative pros like photographers and architects.

Color of the year for 2013 falls outside sRGB gamut

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

Pantone recently announced their color of the year for 2013, a deep shade of emerald green that they call “Emerald 17-5641.” It’s a great color but there’s a catch- most displays cannot accurately show it.

Based on data from Pantone’s website, I was able to plot the color in CIE 1931 (xy). As you can see in the chart below, Pantone’s color is well outside the sRGB/rec.709 color gamut standard used by most HDTVs, the new iPad/iPhone and many desktop monitors. These devices will be stuck showing a version of Pantone’s emerald green that’s less saturated and probably a bit more yellow than the real thing.

This is a perfect example of a popular real-world color that falls outside of the sRGB/rec.709 gamut. Unless you have a monitor that’s able to show wider color gamuts, like the DCI-P3 or Adobe RGB standards, you are missing out on a great color.

iPad Content Creation gets more Colorful with FiftyThree’s Paper app

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

App developer FiftyThree recently updated one of my favorite creativity apps for iOS, Paper, with an impressive new color-related feature. If you are not familiar with Paper, it’s a sketchbook app capable of making the work of even non-artists like me look gallery worthy with an intuitive and responsive interface.

The new feature, which FiftyThree calls “the biggest leap forward in color controls in the past 40 years,” is a color mixer that allows you to create a wide array of colors within the app just as you would in real life. They say they put a lot of time and effort into making the new mixer feel natural. The Paper color mixer works just like finger painting as a kid, mixing yellow and blue in the Paper app mixer produces green.

The new color mixer, shown at the bottom of this screenshot, lets you mix multiple colors to achieve a much wider palette in the new version of Paper.

This is a great feature that expands the content creation capabilities of an already exceptional app. But, as great as this app is, it’s still limited by the color capability of the device it’s installed on. Even the latest iPad, which can produce 100% of the sRGB color gamut, still only shows about 1/3 of the visible color spectrum.

The experience you will have mixing and creating colors on today’s tablets just will not be nearly as dynamic or visceral as making a physical painting. Not until better, wide color gamut technology is adopted in displays will the digital color experience match the stunning world of color we live in.

The case for wide-gamut in your photography workflow, even if you are exporting to sRGB

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

This is a great, exhaustive tutorial on managing color gamut for photographers by color expert Andrew Rodney. He does a great job making the case for working in wide gamut color spaces like Pro Photo, especially when capturing in RAW. Using smaller gamuts like sRGB throws away useful color data that printers and more and more displays can recreate.

How does ink thickness change the appearance of printed color?

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

We typically focus on color as it relates to displays here at dot-color, but I came across a fascinating post about color in the print industry from John the Math Guy that I had to share. In this post, John takes a close look at how ink looks at different thicknesses and uncovers the reasons for some seemingly unconventional color-naming habits in the print industry.

What happens when we double the amount of ink on the paper? …it would seem that the thick layer of magenta is a lot closer to red. The plot below shows the actual spectra of two magenta patches, one at a larger ink film thickness than the other. The plot leads one to the same impression – that a thick layer of magenta is closer to red in hue than a thin layer.

Chart shows different spectrums of thick (red line) and thin (blue line) layers of magenta ink.

Read the whole thing here: http://johnthemathguy.blogspot.com/2012/09/why-does-my-cyan-have-blues.html

Even on Mars, color matters

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

One of the most important pieces of equipment on the Curiosity rover is not a spectrometer or a laser but a color calibration chart. Nothing is simple when you’re sending a robot on a 354 million mile journey into space, but NASA and Bill Nye (yes, the “science guy”) came up with an ingenious solution to calibrate the colors of the onboard cameras.

In order for NASA scientists to be sure that we are seeing “The Red Planet“ in the correct shade of red, they attached red, green and blue color chips to a sundial on the surface of the rover. These reference colors will guarantee the amazing photos we are seeing of the Martian landscape are accurate.

Here is an animated gif of the sundial on the surface of Mars and a close-up shot of it before it left Earth:

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

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

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.

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