HDR displays provide a much wider dynamic range of light and color that more closely matches human visual perception, enabling a more realistic viewing experience. Major companies introduced more affordable HDR TVs in 2016 along with new HDR content. The ICDM is developing methods to quantify and test HDR display performance to help the industry continue advancing this technology.

1. HDR Displays — The “Window to the World” is getting closer than it has
yet been.
— HDR - High Dynamic Range for displays, bringing displays, such as TVs,
closer to the ultimate viewing experience.
2016 may be considered the year of the dawn of HDR displays. Before 2015, HDR
displays existed as specialty laboratory/studio display products.
HDR displays increase the dynamic range of light on a display to be much wider and
more closely match the range of human visual perception of light. They have many
technology improvements, including more intelligent signal processing, wider color
range, and dynamics — dimming dark areas and boosting bright areas for enhanced
dynamic range experiences.
In 2016, major companies introduced families of HDR TV at lower prices, bringing HDR
products much more affordable to the populace Plus HDR content was developed to
show off their impressive capabilities. The major HDR TV manufacturers include
(alphabetical order) LG, Samsung, Sony, and Visio.
If you have a chance to see these TVs running proper HDR content, or, better yet, to get
one for yourself, you will see the wold of displays represent the real world we see to a
much more complete and fulfilling level.
In the ICDM, we are developing to display metrology specific for HDR displays to help
quantify this vastly improved performance. This has never been done before, and the
ICDM has an internal workgroup for HDR which is developing content (test patterns and
material), methods, etc., refining the widely varying definitions concerning HDR
displays, and putting together a specification for testing them.
Some technical background on HDR displays of 2016.
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In general, these are 4K (3840x2160, also called UHD), or 4x the resolution of HD
(1920x1080), 2x the resolution in the horizontal direction and 2x in the vertical direction.
They will be moving higher in resolution, to 8K (7680x4320), in a few years.
This great increase in pixels gives much more and finer detail, enabling a better
picture at several levels.
Luminance for HDR displays is much higher than before, typically over 500cd/m^2 up to
1000 cd/m^2. 1000 cd/m^2 is roughly 10x higher luminance than CRT TV’s. Note that
cd/m^2 (candelas per meter-squared) is sometimes referenced as nits. Sometimes you
may also hear “luminance” stated as “brightness.” This is not correct, but is a common
misstatement.
—Luminance is the light we measure, and it is in cd/m^2, ft-L, etc.
—Brightness is the perception of luminance intensity that the eye sees, is not
measured, and has no units. Yet you will sometimes hear “brightness in nits” —
cringe…………
Color for HDR displays is much more wider than previous displays, almost double what
it was for CRT displays. Color specifications are also increasing tremendously.
Bit depth on modern HDR displays is usually 10-bits, or 4x the number of gray levels of

2. previous HD displays providing 1,073,741,824 total colors vs. the 16,777,216 colors of a
typical HD display. From 16.7 million colors to over a billion!
All in all, this means a tremendous picture and extraordinary viewing experience.
Note that the content delivered to an HDR display must be HDR content to appreciate
the full magnificence of these displays. Typically an HDR TV will indicate that it sees
HDR content when it is received and automatically configure itself to the HDR mode,
and all the requirements (luminance levels, color gamut, electro-optical transfer
characteristics, etc.) That means you don’t have to worry about choosing among so
many confusing modes on the menu system, such as standard, vivid, cinema, sports,
etc., etc.
Today, HDR content is available from some streaming services and some 4K Ultra Blu-
Ray disks. In addition, any HDR content loaded onto a USB drive and plugged into the
USB port of the HDR display will play properly as HDR content. The ICDM is working to
provide some HDR test content (as test patterns) for evaluating HDR displays.
HDR displays are primarily TVs today, with some reference or master monitors also in
production, but you can expect it to expand in the future — such as handheld devices,
medical displays, VR (virtual reality), etc.
—No, this is not a paid write-up. Rather, this is to point out appreciation of this
tremendous leap in display technology as part of my effort to develop display metrology
(methods for testing and numerically evaluating) for HDR displays. The wish is to help
provide methods to quantify the performance quality of the displays to help people
understand what they really are and can do, and to help give incentive to the industry to
continually improve these tremendous technologies found on modern displays. That’s
what we do in the ICDM.
http://www.icdm-sid.org
—————
Joe Miseli
JVM Research
Chair of the ICDM
Chair of the ICDM Workgroup 3 for Display Metrology for HDR Displays
joe.miseli@gmail.com