HDR Widely Available, but Consumer Education Needed, Webinar Told

The consumer tech industry must do a better job of explaining HDR's benefits to consumers, said Tom Doherty, Home Technology Specialists of America director-new technology initiatives, on a Tuesday HDR ecosystem webinar. Consumers are benefiting from the brightness and color gamut improvements made possible by HDR streaming content and TVs, but the industry needs to “do something to increase awareness” so customers ask about the technology “and we can point them in the right direction,” said Doherty.

TV technology was once the cornerstone of the custom installation channel with its focus on home theater, but expansion into areas such as networking, lighting, motorized shades and automation has broadened the topics integrators have to cover with clients in a limited amount of time, Doherty said. Custom-channel customers typically own the most advanced TVs, but benefits of HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision and hybrid log gamma are largely under the radar for them, said Doherty. Though HTSA customers are benefiting from HDR, the industry needs to increase awareness so that customers ask about it “and we can point them in the right direction.”

Event host and industry consultant Marc Finer said information is lacking for consumers looking for content details when they search for content to stream. A search for a movie title could bring up five different versions, “but many people don’t even realize what the differences are between HD and SD, let alone with HDR at 4K resolution,” he told us. TVs can deliver an optimal experience only if consumers know to look for the highest quality content. Nearly every 4K TV produced today comes with some form of HDR -- Dolby Vision, HDR10, HDR10+ and/or hybrid log gamma -- but to be motivated to choose those settings, “you have to understand what the difference is between the various options.”

That requires consumer education, not a new issue for the CE industry, Finer noted. “We do this all the time in our business,” he said. Technology advances, “but we don’t take into account that the consumer isn’t given a road map to follow all these changes,” he said. “We have to close that gap.”

For mainstream customers, getting the sales staff at big-box retailers to demonstrate which movie scenes benefit from HDR would help spread the message, said Bill Mandel, Samsung Research America vice president-industry relations, representing the HDR10+ Technologies consortium. “Luckily, it’s kind of becoming a below-the-line technology,” said Mandel, with baseline HDR in “almost every TV.”

HDR10+ Technologies hopes to spread the word to streaming services so consumers are steered to choose the best picture quality settings their TVs can produce, said Mandel. It’s looking for HDR10 services “that we can flip to 10+ by simply calculating the metadata on the assets they have.”

All content from Amazon Prime Video, the first streaming service to launch HDR in 2015, is in HDR10 and has HDR10+ metadata, with select titles in Dolby Vision, said Amazon Prime Video Principal Video Specialist Ben Waggoner. “If you’re watching HDR content on a TV that supports HDR10+, it’ll take advantage of that metadata and improve your picture quality,” said Waggoner. If the set doesn’t support HDR10+, consumers will experience “normal HDR” with no drawbacks.

HDR content is ubiquitous at Amazon, said Waggoner: It’s “hard to find a Hollywood movie that’s not available in HDR.” The installed base for it is “huge as well,” he said, noting the high percentage of TVs with HDR10. Amazon can generate HDR10+ metadata for an HDR title that comes in without it, said Waggoner. “The only thing we need to do to get more HDR10+ content is to get more HDR content, which we’re doing rapidly.”

Virtually all streaming services support HDR10, with BBC iPlayer as the exception, Pete Lude, Mission Rock Digital chief technology officer, told us, calling that “understandable” since BBC, along with NHK, developed the hybrid log gamma system. Lude expects nearly all TV makers to upgrade from HDR10 to HDR10+, though it “may take a few design cycles.” TV companies are constantly making decisions about features based on market demand and supply chain considerations, he noted.

More high-end mobile devices are adding HDR playback capability, though smartphones play HDR content in a wider range of playback environments than TVs designed for indoor viewing. The metadata in HDR10+ content can help adjust for ambient light issues that challenge mobile devices, said Anjali Wheeler, Google staff software engineer.

HDR10+ uses a display’s full set of brightness and color capabilities, “without headroom,” resulting in brighter, more saturated colors, Waggoner said. Google’s Wheeler said HDR10+ allows for scene by scene changes on YouTube content vs. “the same treatment for the entire length of the movie.” Samsung's Mandel noted HDR10+ content metadata is calculated more rapidly -- “once for every relevant screen” -- vs. once per show for HDR10.

The wide variation in HDR implementations in the early days of high dynamic range content creation have smoothed out, said Waggoner, saying the industry “coalesced around what looks good” for consistency: “It’s not good if you have to change your brightness because your favorite shows are highly variant.”

On the playback side, the HDR10+ consortium introduced ambient light correction this year designed to preserve the creator’s intent while optimizing HDR10+ content for a more consistent viewing experience under various ambient lighting environments, Mandel said. That was in response to complaints that HDR can be dark. HDR10+ Adaptive “takes care of it and makes it really watchable in any environment,” he said.

Brightness is only part of the HDR story, said Amazon’s Waggoner, citing “all that rich detail in the shadows.” He cited seeing “a black cat sleeping on a leather jacket in the shadows at the same time you see the bright noon-day sun and reflections off cars -- in the same frame.” Standard dynamic range “simply can’t show those things at the same time.” He recalled a scene from Bosch with a “bright violet sign,” something he said “mathematically cannot be expressed in SDR. You can’t do bright purple without HDR.”

Google’s Wheeler said the wider color gamut made possible by HDR is more compelling than the increased brightness. “There are shades of green that we could not even display with the previous class of displays,” she said, “and now we have a lot more color range to play with.”