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.
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.
Last summer I wrote a multi-part series here that looked at how much color gamut displays really need. In those articles I used the gamut of colors found in the natural world, as defined by Pointer, as a possible design goal for an ideal color display. Kid Jansen at TFT Central has followed-up on my piece with a much more detailed look at how several current color gamut standards and devices perform compared to Pointer’s gamut. He’s done some great analysis and it’s well worth reading, check it out here.
CES 2014 has come to a close and while many predicted a lackluster year, there were actually a number of interesting developments in displays. These are my top three CES 2014 display technology takeaways:
4K is here now, content isn’t the issue anymore
Analysts are still having a tough time figuring out exactly how quickly 4K will be adopted. According to data presented by the LCD TV Association at the show, last year analysts thought we’d see about 2 million 4K sets in 2014. Actual numbers turned out to be about 13 million (with 10 million predicted in China alone). 4K is clearly happening faster than most predicted but, if anyone still doubted that 4K will be mainstream in the next couple of years, this year’s CES should have made it clear that its here today.
Just about every major set maker showed off 4K sets this year in every flavor imaginable from LCD to OLED. But, hardware has never been the real barrier to 4K adoption– it’s all about the content or lack thereof. At CES 2014, the content issue was resolved a couple of different ways: Netflix is making 4K delivery a priority and upscaling is starting to look really good. With great upscaling (in one demo I saw from Technicolor it was nearly impossible to pick native 4K from upscaled 1080P) and instantly available content from Netflix, I don’t think content availability will continue to be a barrier for 4K adoption.
Wide Color Gamut and High Dynamic Range
Both Dolby and Technicolor demonstrated some very impressive high dynamic range and wide color gamut technologies that make for much more immersive viewing experiences. With it’s new Dolby Vision technology, Dolby has created essentially a new standard that uses a layer of metadata on top of today’s broadcast standard to deliver wider gamut and dynamic range with the content creator’s intentions intact. This is significant because it won’t require a new broadcast standard. Much like their surround-sound offerings (which deliver stereo audio if you have two speakers and full surround if you have six), all you’ll need is a Dolby-capable set to see the advantages, it won’t be something the viewer has to worry about.
Similarly, Technicolor is doing some on-the-fly processing to incoming content in realtime to pull out extra dynamic range and color. Again, no change in broadcast standard required for this and that’s the key. While there’s some danger that artistic intent will be altered with this approach, the demos I saw looked great. Skin tones and memory colors were kept in check while still taking advantage of the extra saturation offered by a wide color gamut display.
Quantum Dots
One of the most impressive displays at CES 2014 was Hisense’s 85″ 4K wide color gamut Quantum Dot TV. This set promises to bring OLED-like color performance at 4K resolutions to the US market this September at LCD prices (we heard a 55″, 65″ and the 85″ will all be offered). A number of other manufacturers also demonstrated Quantum Dot displays off the main show floor. We saw displays ranging in size from 5″ smartphones, to notebooks to monitors as well as TV’s. 2014 looks to be the year that Quantum Dots gain serious traction in the display market after a strong debut in 2013.
Screenshot of Adobe’s Kuler app showing color extraction from a photo
Adobe recently released a new iPhone app called Kuler that let’s you extract colors from your surroundings using the phone’s camera. It’s a useful tool that allows designers to capture color inspiration wherever they find it and easily incorporate it into their work via color palettes.
The app also highlights a weakness in current display technology: no display on the market today can actually reproduce all the colors we see in the environment around us. So, even if the camera sensor can capture that color you love, you may not be seeing an accurate representation of it on your device.
The iPhone 5’s LCD display is designed to cover the sRGB/rec.709 color gamut standard used for HDTV broadcasts. And, it looks great but compared to the world we see around us, it’s just not quite as rich. If we plot the iPhone 5’s color gamut against the gamut of colors found in nature, the phone comes up short in important reds, greens and cyans:
Color gamut of the iPhone 5’s display compared to the gamut of colors found in nature. The iPhone 5 comes up short in red, green and cyan.
If DisplayWeek 2013 was any indication, color has once again become a hot topic in the display industry. Color gamuts are getting larger and it may not be long before we see a display that can match what our eye sees in nature. Over the course of the next year, we will start to see more wide color gamut-capable devices as OLED continues to expand marketshare and new technologies like quantum dot LCD begin to enter the market in volume.
Just back from a great DisplayWeek in Vancouver. Finally had a chance to recover, go through my notes and process everything I saw at the show. Most of the big story lines will be pretty familiar to anyone who followed last years show: TV’s are still getting bigger, OLED TV is still right around the corner, 4K is starting to ship and mobile displays are getting both sharper and more efficient.
DisplayWeek wasn’t all old news though. In fact, just like CES, this year everyone seemed to be talking about color performance. At the annual Display Industry Awards, honors in several categories went to wide gamut display technologies including the Best In Show and Component of the Year awards. And, on the show floor, major manufacturers like 3M, Samsung and LG dedicated significant booth space to wide color gamut or color management technologies.
3M’s Quantum Dot Enhancement Film (QDEF) demo at DisplayWeek 2013. Bottom display is using quantum dots to achieve a wider color gamut than OLED at higher brightness and lower cost.
3M demoed several wide color gamut LCDs based on the Quantum Dot Enhancement Film (QDEF) technology that they are partnering with Nanosys to manufacture. Ranging from smartphone all the way up to 55″ TVs in size, these devices were all showing a wider color gamut than OLED with an especially deep red. This seems like a lot of color but 3M says that in developing their Perceptual Quality Metric (PQM), a new analysis tool aimed at helping display makers model how different performance characteristics will affect end user experience, they found that color saturation positively affected the perception of quality.
In Samsung’s neighboring booth, I found a series of comparison demos designed to show that wide color gamut displays can be both accurate and pleasing to the eye. Each demo featured a camera feeding a live image of several colored objects to both standard and wide color gamut displays. In each case the wide gamut display was able to more accurately recreate the color of the objects in front of the camera. They also showed off the new color management capability of their flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone that allows the device to accurately display rec.709 content without oversaturation- something the previous generation S3 struggled with.
Samsung demonstrating the value of wide gamut displays by showing some common colors that fall outside the rec.709 broadcast gamut standard in a series of demos at DisplayWeek 2013
Finally, at LG’s booth, we saw a new LCD color filter design that allows them to cover the Adobe RGB color gamut used by photographers and print professionals.
With all of this buzz, it looks like we’ll start to see wide color gamut displays start to move into the mainstream in ever larger screen sizes over the next half of this year and into 2014.
