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High Dynamic Range Monitors
An anonymous reader writes, "We are seeing more and more about high dynamic range (HDR) images, where the photographer brackets the exposures and then combines the images to increase the dynamic range of the photo. The next step is going to be monitors that can display the wider dynamic range these images offer, as well as being more true-to-life, as they come closer to matching the capabilities of the ol' Mark I eyeball. The guys who seem to be furthest along with this are a company called Brightside Technologies. Here is a detailed review of the Brightside tech." With a price tag of $49K for a 37" monitor (with a contrast ratio of 200K to 1), HDR isn't exactly ready for the living room yet.
Of course one of the other principal arenas where monitors like this are valuable is in medical imaging. One of the serious shortcomings in the migration of radiology to digital formats is the reduced quality of the images as compared to film. The dynamic range of film is simply so much greater than can be achieved with standard CRTs or LCD monitors that there is a real danger of missing out on very subtle changes in X-Rays for example. While it's true that image processing can make up for some differences, digital still can't quite compete with film for many purposes including data density in many cases.
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Maybe you're not ready for one for your living room, but I'm looking for the order form! Who wouldn't want this? And if you think the price is outrageous, consider how expensive LCD TV's were 7-10 years ago.
Weren't there SGI monitors once upon a time that has an extra gun for rendering brighter highlights?
I've used laptops that were a bit painful for extended use at maximum brightness, as is the DS Lite.
I appreciate that you can also make the blacks blacker, but surely there is a perceptual limit there which we are fairly near already.... especially since even a hint of ambient-light glare on the screen will wash out the differences at the dark end of the spectrum.
This seems like a good candidate for high dynamic range if it is not vaporware:
/ 11/0214254
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
I've been seeing these at Siggraph for years. They do look very nice. You basically need a very bright light source (not hard) that doesn't generate too much heat (a little harder) and a way to modulate that light over a very large range (harder). It would be fun to have a converter for DSLR RAW images to display in HDR, or the usual bracketed ones.
The examples they usually use are things like light streaming through stained glass in a church, where normally you'd either only see the stained glass properly exposed, or the rest of the room, but not both. It does work to very good effect in those instances, and heightens the "window into the world" effect that high resolution displays have. If this were to be combined with 2X HD resolution 60P motion video (about 4,000 pixels across) it would kick serious ass as the next 'Imax' lifelike motion picture display.
Oddly enough, the captcha for the post reply screen right now is 'aperture'.
If it takes an expensive display system before people stop going nuts over excessively tonemapped HDR images, then so be it. It's still going to be different from viewing the real scene because bright highlights and dark shadows will be much closer together on a relatively small screen, so our eyes won't be able to adapt as easily. A nicely tonemapped picture, perhaps combined with a slightly higher dynamic range than on today's displays, will beat "1:1" recreations any day.
Since "true" HDR consumera camera's don't exist (anyone know?), it can be faked, quite convincingly, I might add.
i.e.
"It's a feature in Photoshop CS2 or Photomatix or FDRTools."
Even black and white can be support HDR. This is a great B&W example of why 8-bit greyscale just doesn't cut it.
--
"The difference between Religion and Philosophy, is that one is put into practise"
I was pretty excited until I saw the 49K price tag. That really killed the ole puppy. 5K I'd be highly interested but 49K is about 44K out of my budget range. Strictly for ultra high enders.
Published: 4th October 2005 by Geoff Richards
Um, yeah.
I saw a hdr display from brightside tech either last year or the year before at Siggraph a conference on computer graphics. I thought it was such a cool Idea untill I saw it in person. They had a few images up and one was of a sunset, it was like looking directly at a sunset, pretty amazing but ULTRA bright. So bright that I didnt want to look at it and my eyes couldnt adjust to it. Why buy a display so you have to have sunglasses too look at it?
I always figured if you really looked at a real lightsaber, instead of being, say, pink in the middle, they'd really look intense burn-your-retinas red, like looking at the little red lights on the underside of your mouse.
I'm not sure I'd pay $49,000 for a tv just for that purpose, but it's the best one I could think of. I'd certainly pay that much for a lightsaber though.
If you read their site, they explain that actually the contrast goes to 0, because a pixel on their screen can have 0 brightness.
.1 or .01.
Apparently this actually breaks the industry equation for deriving contrast (divide by 0), so they had to bump it up to like
Pretty awesome technology.
I was under the impression that SED monitors were set to be the new big thing starting in the next couple years and that they're also boasting very high contrast ratios too with very low power consumption. And given that they're supposed to be mass-produced by comparison, hopefully the price would be significantly lower.
ART on dA
Even the brightest displays (with the exception of direct laser-into-the-eye projection systems) don't come close to the intensity of natural light. Sunlight is up to 200 times brighter than an office with typical lighting. Try using a backlit (i.e. non-reflectively lit) notebook display in bright sunlight and you'll see what I mean: the maximum brightness of the notebook display is so low that your eye can't resolve the difference between the white-vs-sun and black-vs-sun contrasts - IOW you can't read the display.
Mammography has gone completely digital. Why? Because the quality of the imagery is lightyears better than what you can get for film. Couple that with rapid processing from a scanner laser and throw in algorithms that contrast enhance areas of nearly neutral density and you have a recipe for catching growths that would otherwise miss detection.
A good, excellent radiologist could detect subtle differences of about 80% that of a standard person. I'd give you the exact quote but it's been a while since I remembered the data- suffice to say I was impressed at the level (in controlled lighting situations) that they were able to see in film.
A good medical display is a peeled LCD- all the colors have been chemically removed from the surface- and has typically a brighter backlight and another polarizer to knock down the lmin even further. This gives you better dynamic range that is easily adjusted faster than film can- want to zoom in? No problem- touch and zoom- or if you had film, grab a loupe (or crane your head closer). Digital wins hands down.
Yes, if you digitize a negative you have a data density that can't be reached very easily (I used to estimate this for a job for large quantities of imagery and at high quality ratios- 2 micron spot sizes). But frankly alot of that information is useless- you don't need to know what isn't of relevance.
The most important aspect of digital imaging is proper viewing environment- something no one seems to get. Reduce the lighting of the area to 0.5 fc and remove any sources of glare off the monitor. Wear dark clothing. Have wall wash lighting appropriate to about 3-9 fc. Have surfaces neutral gray. Ceiling black.
Digital definately competes with film in many markets for medical xray- Mammography was just the easiest to choose because it has been such a radical change in such a short time period.
I should note I used to work for Eastman Kodak and did work with other individuals on these digital products (specifically, algorithms)... but I'm not biased because of that. Just the simple truth- from the raw data I've seen I'll feel happy and safe knowing my wife gets a digital mammagram every year.
The BrightSide DR37-R EDR display theoretically has an infinite contrast ratio. How? Because it can turn individual LED backlights off completely (see How It Works), it has a black luminance of zero. When you divide any brightness value by this zero black value, you get infinity.
It goes from 0 to 4000cd/m^2. Their comparison model, the LVM-37w1, goes from 0.55 to 550cd/m^2.
So this toy gets as close to true black as you can get - "off", thus constrained by the ambient light level. For white, they manage 4000cd/m^2, or comparable to fairly bright interior lighting.
Consider me impressed, but realistically, this only amounts to roughly an 8x brightness improvement over the best normal displays, with true-black thrown in as a perk (they suspiciously don't mention the next lowest intensity, no doubt because it goes back into the realm of a contrast ratio of only a few thousand.
I know slashdot always runs behind digg by a few days or even a week or two, but this is ridiculous.
Always look on the Bright Side of life
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
We've all seen the scenes in movies (WarGames, Sneakers, 2001, etc...) where someone is looking at a monitor and we see the reflection of the image on the screen projected out onto their faces.
Question: is the image showing up like that purely a function of the brightness of what the person is looking at? IOW, would an HDR monitor have the effect of "projecting" the image out as if one were staring into an overhead?
Someone mentioned above that pictures/video of stained glass windows were often used as demos of HDR tech. Did it have this sort of effect in the demo room?
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Yes, and my point is that a display as bright as direct sunlight would be unpleasant to use - do I really want to use sunglasses when I'm watching a documentary about deserts? More importantly, do I want to give advertisers the chance to use borderline painful flashes of light to attract my attention?
I do agree that bright displays are needed for outdoor use on sunlit days, at least for situations where you can't just turn the display at 90 degrees to the light.
I'm all for making monitors with better contrast but the BrightSide solution is a little silly.
4000 cd/m^2 is their models peak luminance. The nice thing about a standard 300 cd/m^2 monitor is that I can stare at a picture of the sun for as long as I want without blinding myself. I'm not sure I would want to do that with one of these... Not because it's enough to blind you or anything, but it could cause your pupils to dialate so when you turn it off everything would be really dark.
Nice, but I wonder why no one has commented on the fact that the video card is still outputting, at best, plain old integer 32bit RGBA. What would be nice is a video card that outputs FP32 or better, combined with an HDR monitor that accepts FP32 or better input. Right now the technology is "reconstructing" the dynamic range...but, this is a lossy process and "true" HDR with a full HDR path from rendering, to transmission, to display, will look even more orders of magntitude better I'd wager.
These kinds of monitors are probably not worth it. For the purposes of mammalian vision, high dynamic range is a nuisance that needs to be gotten rid of, and that's exactly what the human eye is doing. You still notice that a high dynamic range is present, but you don't really perceive it.
A little more dynamic range than what your average LCD monitor has would be nice, but aiming for reproducing anything resembling the full dynamic range of natural scenes is a waste of time and money.
...having sanwditch of two identical LCD panels, glued one on another and driven with essentially the same signal ?
One would probably need a bit stronger backlight and maybe special mask between the panes so that ligt form one pixel on one LCD could go just through tha same position on another panel...
I can't wait till this goes mainstream. Then I'll be able to watch a video of a solar eclipse and actually get blinded by the image. Coool.
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If you RTFA, they're using a 45x31 array of independent backlights. I wonder what contrast ratio you'd get for a checkerboard with each square only a few px on a side - since they claim they're using the same liquid crystals as normal displays, I guess the local contrast is still limited to two orders of magnitude like everything else. Now, this probably isn't as much of a problem, because two orders of magnitude is a lot for two points right next to each other.... I wonder if there are any weird effects when panning images with relatively high local contrast as different parts of the image move over the boundaries between the backlights.
hdr pron, omg!
Haven't seen anybody comment on this yet -- if you dig through the actual specs you'll see one reason why this technology hasn't already taken off. The power consumption of the display is 1680 watts. You basically wouldn't want to put anything else on a household circuit with it.
-G
I can't seem to find a reference to it online... I'd appreciate one if someone has one... but circa 1960 the Polaroid company developed a film for recording nuclear tests, which was similar to three-layer color film except that the three layers, instead of being sensitized to different colors, were given emulsions with widely different sensitivities. The fastest emulation was similar to Kodak Royal-X Pan, ISO 1600, and the slowest was similar to Kodak Microfile, and if I recall correctly had an ISO speed of something like 0.1
The result was to extend the useful dynamic range of the film by a factor of 10000 or so--more than a dozen additional f-stops of latitude, or extra Ansel zones, if you like.
The film was processed in regular Kodacolor chemistry (IIRC), each layer coming out a different color. In color, the result was a "false color" image displaying a huge dynamic range of light intensity; or, it could be printed as black-and-white using different filters to select different intensity ranges.
In effect, the photographer was automatically bracketing every shot by a dozen F-stops, in a single shutter click.
It was an incredibly neat hack. I wonder whatever became of it?
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> We are seeing more and more about high dynamic range (HDR) images,
> where the photographer brackets the exposures and then combines
> the images to increase the dynamic range of the photo.
So instead of an image that goes from black to white, you have an image
that goes from dark grey to light grey. Now you can see all the stuff
that would've been hard to make out in a single photo. I think what has
happened is that you've *decreased* the dynamic range in the photo (or,
more properly speaking, you've used the fixed range better).
If a new camera provides pixels in the range [0,10] instead of the range
[0,1] you can still have the same problem. It's where you map the values
that come through the lens that makes the photo ledgible or not.
Or maybe I'm missing something.
I'm more excited about the really low black level instead of the super-high brightness. Those pictures show just how shitty the black level of LCD displays is. With this new technology LCDs will finally be able to compete with CRT black levels. Brightside should produce models with normal peak luminance (conveniently avoiding the cooling problems) for home applications. I just wonder how they avoid any significant halos with that low-resolution led panel lighting up the high-resolution LCD panel.
You are correct in your description of what is being labeled "HDR" currently. However, you are actually a bit backwards on the subject. HDR is really the gimmick here. It's a trick, a way of approximating reality.
The term HDR is misleading. It's more accurate to describe it as a technique which uses dynamic range compression. Taking a real-life scene with a large dynamic range and compressing it into the limited range available on a monitor or in print. You are not increasing dynamic range, you are merely creating the perception of it. An image of the sun will not be displayed any brighter than what your monitor is capable of producing.
These new monitors are capable generating genuine high dynamic range. They produce blinding bright highlights while still rendering deep dark shadow details, but you can't assess this quality without viewing it directly. They're subject to the same "have to see it to beleive it" problem as HDTV.
Crysis was shown on a BrightSide monitor at SIGGRAPH. These monitors hook up to commercial off-the-shelf hardware. The price should drop dramatically in the future when better production processes are in place, much like any new product. ;)
(as long as the software supports HDR/their DLL)
Eizo has made wide-gamut monitors for some time, and this company has HDR displays, but all of this is moot with current GPUs and connections. Can anyone point a person with an Adobe RGB monitor, or one of these HDR monitors to a graphics card that supports them? Who cares if your monitor can display 18-bits per pixel of color information if your GPU outputs or is upconverting from 8-bits per pixel?
Just think of all the great p0rN you can view with one of these things... you know, all those dark recesses and everything. And haven't we all wondered what was happening in the rest of the room, away from the lights??? And... well, uh... you know.... other stuff too
Now all we need is smell-a-vision!
(Uh... or maybe not!)
There is no single agreed upon definition of contrast.
In general though I use the word in the same way as the other poster, can't have infinite contrast in a non dark room.
Does anyone know which part of the screen justifies such a high price?
Isn't this screen basically a commercial LCD with a modified backlight (a couple hundreds of LEDs controlled by a special channel in the signal)?
referance?
IS everyone on slashdot o.k.??
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