Panasonic Patent Would Make TVs More 'Eye-Friendly' When Mixing SDR, HDR

Panasonic, which is partnering with Samsung and Fox in the HDR10+ licensing consortium announced just before IFA (see 1708280018), has been probing ways to avert the practical problems that predictably will occur as the content industry moves gradually from standard dynamic range to HDR, a recently published U.S. patent application shows. TV sets will need to deal on the fly with whatever signals are thrown at them, especially an unpredictable mix of video and graphics, from separate TV and data channels, in both SDR and HDR, said the application (20170311034), filed in June and published Oct. 26 at the Patent and Trademark Office. In the application, two inventors from the Panasonic Intellectual Property Management Co. office in Osaka say research found "various problems occurring in a conventionally unexpected environment” where SDR and HDR graphics need to be displayed simultaneously with SDR and HDR video. Viewers risk “visual discomfort” from that mix, especially when the different signals are differently switching between SDR and HDR, says the application. One way to make TV images more "eye friendly” is to transmit metadata that codes the appropriate opto-electrical and electro-optical transfer functions for the data and video signal where it's needed, it says. Where the video and data functions are different, the metadata can just code the “offset” or difference between them, it says. A suitably equipped TV set will then smoothly adjust the picture and graphics dynamic ranging so there are no eye-jarring effects on screen, it says. It's unclear from the application whether existing HDR TV sets could be modified with software updates to handle data graphics in this way, nor does the application speculate when a new generation of more graphics-friendly TV sets will become available. Panasonic representatives didn't comment.