Netflix believes HDR more important than 4K
- Thread starter nutmegger
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roxics
Veteran
I don't get the HDR hype. I can't see the difference. It just looks like a slight gamma shift to me.
I can see 4K if I get close enough to the TV or a big enough screen. But it's not that big of a deal to me. What impresses me though is OLED.
I'm also still peeved no one makes 3D TVs anymore.
I can see 4K if I get close enough to the TV or a big enough screen. But it's not that big of a deal to me. What impresses me though is OLED.
I'm also still peeved no one makes 3D TVs anymore.
G
Guest
Guest
HDR opens up the 10bit world. Don't fight it please! =)
puredrifting
Major Contributor
I wrote an article a couple of years ago about DolbyVision, a form of HDR. From an engineering standpoint, if implemented correctly, it makes a noticeable difference. You've probably only seen half-assed implementation of HDR, either because the production pipeline dropped the ball at some point or the device you viewed it on wasn't optimized or set up correctly. HDR is real and it can look spectacular but I've seen a lot of incompetently performed implementations of it that looked ho-hum.
Yes unfortunately that's what killed stereoscopy. Poor implementation mostly exploiting the hype. If we keep going that same way about HDR it will meet the same fate . Like the old saying-"keep doing what you're doing and you'll keep receiving what you're receiving". Some executives never learn- "smash and grab" mentality ;-) But maybe that's the way to roll in the entertainment industry...
roxics
Veteran
Revisiting this thread to admit I was wrong.
Two weeks ago I bought a new 4K TV. Not the best on the market but decent enough. A TCL 55" 6 series. It has Dolby Vision and 96 local dimming zones and so on.
Just this past weekend I picked up a UHD Blu-ray player to go with it.
Now that it's in my home and I can watch it in the dark, I can definitely see the difference. HDR is spectacular in certain scenes of certain movies. I was watching the 4K Blu-ray of Red Sparrow last night and the scene where him and her are on the bed talking with the daylight coming through the window behind them is stunning.
It took me a while to dial in the right TV settings and the TV likes to keep changing them depending on the input I'm using, which is frustrating. The point is, I can see a difference now. 4K not as much. It does look sharper, but I'm not as impressed by that.
filmguy123
Veteran
This is a slight but relevant tangent - correct me if I am wrong but Samsung's QLED tvs don't support Dolby Vision, do they? HDR yes, but because samsung is pushing it's own format, does it not have dolby vision?
Run&Gun
Veteran
I have an LG OLED that supports both DolbyVision and HDR10 and when you watch HDR content, the set automatically switches to the pre-set picture profile for HDR. My only real complaint about that is that it does not always completely change back to my normal viewing profile afterwards, which causes weird banding and gradation on "non-HDR" content.
Mike Krumlauf
Award Winning Filmmaker
To me I feel like 4K is more of a gimmick than HD was when HD was first announced. HD made sense to me given what we had with SD at the time. 4K i guess is good for digital theaters I guess but for the home, idk, My fiance and I made the switch to a samsung 4K tv 55inch and an apple tv 4k and sure the colors seem richer but everything kind of looks the same to me. I've learned in the almost 20 years ive been creating to not follow marketing trends, especially on a budget. There are plenty of new films and shows on netflix that are showing up in HD that they bought from places like sundance so i will always believe that most important thing is content. You give Netflix something they know they can market and profit off of, this whole 4K HDR BS will seem irrelevant.
combatentropy
Veteran
roxics
Veteran
I completely understand what you're saying. I expected to be more blown away by 4K and HDR than I was, which I think is why I couldn't see it at first. I should know better but I was expecting my jaw to be on the floor the whole time with how high resolution and how bright everything was said to be. I had read so much hype about how much of a game changer HDR was, I was expecting to have to put on sunglasses for some scenes while watching TV mid day in a brightly lit room. I had to learn to lower my expectations and see it for what it is. Once I did and I was able to tune things in and watch things in the dark, I was able to see it really is spectacular, just not all the time and not to the extreme I initially expected. For 80-90% of a typical 4K blu-ray you could swap it out with a regular blu-ray and I might not noticed the difference.
2K really is the sweet spot. You can go higher and at times see the difference, but it becomes a much more subtle difference and you have to start controlling more external things for the difference to matter. Light levels in the room you're watching in, how tired you are and so on. Kind of like listening to a high end audio format in the car with the windows down. It's not ideal for that environment. You could get away with a cassette tape and be fine. But... I'll still take a 4K blu-ray and TV if given the choice so that when things are optimal, I'm watching the very best I can watch. It may only be a handful of scenes in a movie, but they're gorgeous.
Thomas Smet
Veteran
Not sure I would call 4k a gimmick but generally I agree with you. What I mean is that it in itself is not a gimmick. Its just the nature of increasing resolution which has an exponential decline in ROI the higher you go. The same is true of color depth, audio bit depth, audio sampling, stills resolution, video resolution and of course TV resolution. There is an improvement in some cases but the higher we go the less anybody is going to notice the advantage. Thats just the nature of how values work. The move to 8k will be even more ridiculous. Not that it is fake or some kind of gimmick but the human eye and reasonable viewing distances are what make it visually pointless. 8k has its place in a large movie theater but anything under an 80" TV is pointless really. Even the 5k iMac when one sits inches from the screen is extremely difficult to see individual pixels and a 8k 27" iMac would be completely worthless. Heck my old eyes can't barely see the pixels on my 2.5k 2012 iMac.
Terry_Lasater
All about the Caption
Run&Gun
Veteran
Agree with a lot of what you said, BUT part of the point is to NOT be able to see the individual pixels at closer viewing distances(or larger screen size).
Thomas Smet
Veteran
Which is exactly the point I was making. 5k a mere inches from our faces on a 27" iMac is already at the point where we can't see any pixels at all. That means 8k is such a worthless move for most people. Even on a computer monitor designed to be right in front of us there is no way anybody would see any advantage over 4k. Now if one wants to use a 42" monitor as a computer monitor (some software developers actually do) then yes 4k may not be enough but thats a bit of an extreme case. Same goes for a TV. Unless one is in the habit of mounting a large TV right across from the toilet I doubt anything beyond 4k will ever be noticed by any human on the planet.
4k is already pushing it except for situations where one gets very close to the TV. Basically the main point of a 4k TV is to sell to people in stores when they are standing inches away from it. Stores love 4k TVs because they have a wow factor when standing that close. Even in those situations I doubt 8k will make a difference. I'm not sure how the heck stores are going to sell 8k TVs without sounding like complete douche bags. Thats where features like HDR are critical. Its at least something people standing at a store getting irritated by some kid trying to convince them they have to have a certain TV can notice on a tangible level. A side by side comparison of a 4k vs 8k TV is going to be almost impossible to show a customer without smashing their face against the screen or the TV purposely dumbing down the 4k TV like they used to do between DVD and Blu-ray. I noticed once Best Buy hooked the DVD player up via RCA vs the Blu-ray player that was HDMI. I told the sales guy it was al little misleading to those that don't understand the differences and he told me they had to do it because people couldn't tell the difference even standing up close. They had to go out of their way to make the DVD look like crap.
I currently have a 55" HDTV and I still find it to look amazing in my living room. 4k would have at best a marginal level of punch and clarity and really if I upgrade to a 4k TV and a 4k Apple TV it will be to get HDR more than the 4k resolution.
Run&Gun
Veteran
Sounds just like the Monster Cable "scandal" several years back, where they were caught doing some hanky-panky with the Monster Cable display to make "ordinary" cables look inferior to theirs.
When one of my audio guys bought a new "flat screen" a few years back(maybe five or more) at BB, we took my nanoFlash with 'camera original' HD footage and played it back directly on the sets he was looking at, to make sure he was watching a true, unadulterated HD image.