Replies to post #355469 on NanoTech Entertainment Inc (NTEK)

[Sammy2015]

HDR, like 4K, is a manipulation of exiting technology that has been around a long time. Neither hdr or 4K is new. They are hyped format changes, improvements. Improvements in image quality isn't a spanking new thing. HDR has been around, known by different names. It's a process. Photoshop has had HDR process for decades.

I have to stop you there because with that paragraph you proved you don't know what HDR is about. Yours is a common misconception which is luckily slowly disappearing, thanks to correct information being available on the web.

What you are thinking of is the "old" HDR. What new TVs, Netflix and Ultra HD Blu-ray are talking of is the "new" HDR. Even though they have the same name (unfortunately), they are practically the polar opposites in most other respects.

For more than 20 years we've been mastering content to BT.709 standard. That means Rec.709 color space (contains roughly 35% of colors the human eye can see), 8-bit color depth and 8 stops of dynamic range. Before that we had 40 years of much narrower limits set by NTSC and analog televisions.

Film, and more recently digital cameras, have been able to capture images that have more colors and dynamic range than BT.709 allows for a long time now. Capturing better images has not been a problem - but mastering and delivering them to consumers has so far been impossible due to lack of a standard specifying how that is achieved.

That "old" HDR is an attempt to take the image data that has been captured but is outside the BT.709 standard, and to "crush" it in order to bring it within the "borders" of BT.709 so it can be viewed. That process is called tone-mapping. But no matter how you slice it, "old" HDR is still viewed within and limited by BT.709.

"New" HDR throws away those limitations and delivers images that are much closer to the ones originally captured. That is the revolution of "new" HDR: the removal of legacy bottlenecks on the delivery path.

With UHD and HDR, BT.709 has been replaced by BT.2020. What that means:
- Rec.709 color space replaced by Rec.2020 color space: from 35% of colors we can see to 76% of colors we can see.

- 10-bit color depth instead of 8-bit: from a palette of 16 million colors to a palette of more than a billion colors.

- true High Dynamic Range: from a contrast ratio of roughly 100:1 (8 stops) to all the way to 10,000:1 (13-14 stops).

In short, BT.2020 allows for vastly more life-like images than BT.709. The "old" HDR you think of is BT.709; this "new" HDR is BT.2020.

We can discuss ad nauseaum whether consumers will embrace "new" HDR or not (they will), or whether NTEK will ever offer HDR content (they won't) but first you need to understand the difference between the old and the new.