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

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.

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.

How much color gamut do displays really need? Part 3: Existing color gamut standards

Last week I looked at the three “P’s” of human color perception– physical, physiological and psychological– as a way to help define a color gamut for the ideal display. Based on real world examples from art and commerce, I concluded that the range of colors found in nature, as measured by Pointer, provided the best fit with our two design goals which were an accurate and exciting, immersive experience.

This week, I’d like to get a little more practical and take a look at existing color gamut standards to see what we might realistically be able to achieve today.

What fits best?

Color gamut of 4,000 surface colors found in nature as measured by Pointer in 1980 against the color gamut of the iPhone 5.

Color gamut of 4,000 surface colors found in nature as measured by Pointer in 1980 against the color gamut of the iPhone 5.

The first thing you’ll notice about Pointer’s gamut (pictured above again) is that it’s a pretty odd, squiggly shape. This means it is going to be difficult to cover efficiently with a three primary system that mixes just red, green and blue to create all the colors we see, like the LCD found in the iPhone. In order to cover Pointer’s with just those three colors, we’d need to make them extremely saturated. There are proposed standards that take this  approach, such as rec.2020, but since they are not practical to implement today from a technology standpoint I’ve decided to ignore them for this discussion.

For the near future, we’ll need to rely on just three colors to get the job done, so what can we do now? Let’s look at two popular wide color gamut standards: Adobe 1998 and DCI-P3:

Current wide color gamut standards Adobe RGB 1998, commonly used by pro photographers and designers, and DCI-P3, used in digital cinema, compared to Pointer's gamut in CIE 1976

Current wide color gamut standards Adobe RGB 1998, commonly used by pro photographers and designers, and DCI-P3, used in digital cinema, compared to Pointer’s gamut in CIE 1976

Let’s start with Adobe 1998. Many people are familiar with this color gamut since it is found as an option on many consumer cameras and it is popular among creative professionals. It certainly covers a significantly wider range of colors than the HDTV broadcast standard with a very deep green point. The rich cyans that we talked about in the movie “The Ring” would look great in Adobe 1998. But, we’re not getting any more of those exciting reds and oranges. In fact, Adobe’s red point is identical to the HDTV broadcast standard.

What about DCI-P3 then? Designed to match the color gamut of color film and used in cinemas all over the world, DCI-P3 has a very wide gamut. The reds are particularly deep and, of course, all of the colors from the movies we looked at are covered. Still, it’s missing a lot of the deep greens found in Adobe 1998 and only just fits the green Pantone color of the year. So DCI-P3 is not quite perfect either.

What about a hybrid, custom gamut? 

What if we combined the green from Adobe with the red from DCI-P3 and their shared blue point? We’d end up with pretty good, high 90’s percentage coverage of Pointer’s gamut, coverage of all of the existing HDTV broadcast content, full coverage of cinema content from Hollywood and a superior ecommerce experience with most of the colors from the natural world covered.

Hybrid color gamut standard that combines the green point from Adobe 1998 with the deep red of DCI-P3

Hybrid color gamut standard that combines the green point from Adobe 1998 with the deep red of DCI-P3

Looks pretty great and we can make displays now that cover this color gamut with today’s technology. But how would it work on the content side? Would we need to get together and agree on this new standard and then wait for years while it is slowly adopted by content creators and display makers?

Next week

Next week we’ll look at how content delivery might evolve to support gamuts like this without the need for major changes to broadcast standards.

ITU agrees on HEVC h.265 codec

h-265-logo,Q-D-349573-3The ITU announced today that it’s members have agreed upon a new high efficiency video codec. Dubbed HEVC H.265, the new format is designed to improve on and ultimately replace the current king of all codecs, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC which covers 80% of internet video today.

So far, a lot of attention has been given to the codec’s ability to deliver the same quality video as 264 with only half the bandwidth. That kind of efficiency improvement is a big deal– it could reduce strain on networks and bring high-resolution 4K content delivery over the internet closer to reality.

h265 vs h264 quality comparisonThere are also some important changes for color in the new spec. Recent drafts by the ITU’s Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) have added support for wider color gamuts like Adobe RGB 1998 and 12-bit video. This paves the way for fantastic looking color as wide gamut-capable hardware starts to become more widely available.

Is creativity the next killer mobile app?

Since the debut of the iPad in 2010, tablets have become the ultimate content consumption device, but many still to wonder if they’ll ever be capable of replacing notebooks for portable content creation.

While tablets may never truly replace notebooks for all of our content creation needs, especially typing intensive ones, a new crop of apps for iOS and Android are certainly making a case for it.

A little doodle made with the glorious new #Paper app for the iPad from @FiftyThree

(via Brian Taylor from CandyKiller: A little doodle made with the glorious new #Paper app)

Recent creative apps like Paper by fiftythree, Adobe’s Photoshop Touch and Apple’s iPhoto for iOS have just started to scratch the surface of the creative capabilities of powerful mobile devices. These apps show us that mobile creativity, when done right, can harness the unique properties of a touchscreen handheld device to offer new capabilities that a laptop cannot duplicate. Drawing with a stylus in Paper, for example, feels remarkably precise and expressive because of a neat gesture trick- the speed of your pen controls the thickness of the line. Similarly, in Photoshop Touch and iPhoto, editing your photos by actually putting your hands on them, while less precise than a keyboard and mouse, can be a revelation for broad stroke tasks like blending two images.

Tablets clearly have the processing power, the battery life and display resolution necessary to become serious creative tools, but there’s one thing missing: color. Creative professionals normally work on displays capable of showing a range of colors that is as much as 60% wider than even the latest “high color saturation” iPad. Artists need to see the content they are creating in the same vibrant colors they see in the real world.  Improving the color performance on mobile devices will make tablets truly worthy of a place in any creative professional’s regular workflow.

Record Smashing Sales of Video games like Activision’s Call of Duty will drive sales of high color gamut displays

If you ever doubted that video games are big business Activision’s recent sales record should be enough to convince you. On its way to reaching $1 billion in sales in just over two weeks with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Activision smashed every entertainment sales record.

Every entertainment sales record.

That means books, movies and video games. Over its lifetime the franchise has generated in the neighborhood of $6 billion in revenue, which puts it squarely into a Star Wars-level stratosphere as one of the most valuable entertainment properties ever.

What does this have to do with high gamut color display technology?

One of the potential hurdles to widespread adoption of high color gamut display technologies is a lack of content that’s optimized to take advantage of all those extra colors.

With Hollywood-sized blockbuster sales comes Hollywood-sized budgets to create rich new universes for gamers to explore. The expanded creative palette that high color gamut technology offers game developers is a perfect fit. What color is the blood of a martian supposed to be when it explodes and why limit it to a range of colors typically seen on earth?

Additionally, on the platform side, electronics manufacturers could take advantage of a push into high gamut displays to differentiate their entire hardware/software ecosystem. We already know that the current PlayStation™ hardware is capable of the xvColor high gamut standard. Pairing that with wide color games and a TV that can show it might prove a useful differentiator for any platform.

Videogames may just be the driving force that finally pushes high gamut displays into the mainstream.