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Ask Slashdot: Why Don't HDR TVs Have sRGB Or AdobeRGB Ratings?
dryriver writes: As anyone who buys professional computer monitors knows, the dynamic range of the display device you are looking at can be expressed quite usefully in terms of percentage sRGB coverage and percentage AdobeRGB coverage. The higher the percentage for each, the better and wider the dynamic range of the screen panel you are getting. People who work with professional video and photographs typically aim for a display that has 100 percent sRGB coverage and at least 70 to 80 percent AdobeRGB coverage. Laptop review site Notebookcheck for example uses professional optical testing equipment to check whether the advertised sRGB and AdobeRGB percentages and brightness in nits for any laptop display panel hold up in real life.
This being the case, why do quote-unquote "High Dynamic Range" capable TVs -- which seem to be mostly 10 bits per channel to begin with -- not have an sRGB or AdobeRGB rating quoted anywhere in their technical specs? Why don't professional TV reviewers use optical testing equipment that's readily available to measure the real world dynamic range of HDR or non-HDR TVs objectively, in hard numbers? Why do they simply say "the blacks on this TV were deep and pleasing, and the lighter tones were..." when this can be expressed better and more objectively in measured numbers or percentages? Do they think consumers are too unsophisticated to understand a simple number like "this OLED TV achieves a fairly average 66 percent AdobeRGB coverage?"
This being the case, why do quote-unquote "High Dynamic Range" capable TVs -- which seem to be mostly 10 bits per channel to begin with -- not have an sRGB or AdobeRGB rating quoted anywhere in their technical specs? Why don't professional TV reviewers use optical testing equipment that's readily available to measure the real world dynamic range of HDR or non-HDR TVs objectively, in hard numbers? Why do they simply say "the blacks on this TV were deep and pleasing, and the lighter tones were..." when this can be expressed better and more objectively in measured numbers or percentages? Do they think consumers are too unsophisticated to understand a simple number like "this OLED TV achieves a fairly average 66 percent AdobeRGB coverage?"
"why do not have an sRGB or AdobeRGB rating ... Why don't professional TV reviewers use optical testing equipment..."
Because video is ultimately encoded as YCrCb, wide gamut is compared against Rec. 2020, and you're not looking at the right review sites
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TV's actually have quite a different color space and are also a lot brighter than the professional monitors which would make the settings for the AdobeRGB or sRGB ratings kind of moot since nobody uses a TV at 35-40% of the brightness (to get to the 160 cd/sqm).
You really don't want an "HDR TV" as a monitor and vice versa, hence the ratings are pointless.
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For all intensive purposes that's an eggcorn I hadn't seen before, but it's a doggy dog world out there and I have zero taller ants for this sort of thing which some people are known to have a feel day with...
Achem... Stop confusing terminology... AdobeRGB and sRGB coverage are the "color gamut" spec. While its valid to ask why these aren't promoted in TV specs, "dynamic range" is a completely different spec item.
Broadly speaking, TV's are for consumers, monitors for creators. We consumers just wanna know if it looks good and numbers won't necessarily tell us that. There's a high quotient of subjectivity there.
It's like when you take your car to be smogged, you get that printout with all kinds of numbers on it. Do you care? No, you just zoom into the pass/fail part. The DMV and the guy doing the test might care, but the numbers are irrelevant to your purposes.
Because 99.95% of consumers don't give a shit.
Lots of good answers already, but the simplest is hardly anyone outside certain industry's have any idea of color space. Try explaining how monitor color and printer color work is like trying to explain physics to a toddler. (generally speaking) It shouldn't be that hard, but somehow. most people don't get the concept until their image comes back with pink rather then red.
Firstly, quote-on-quote is just wrong (points for hyphenation, though). It's said 'quote-unquote' and is the spoken way of indicating that the phrase that follows would probably have quotes around it in written form, to indicate the phrase "so-called". So many people use air quotes in conversation that it's probably no surprise the author is unfamiliar with the correct spelling. This leads me to the next obvious thing which is that the piece is written. The quotes are actually used in the text around the part that is 'quote-unquoted', so there is no need for that phrase at all.
Was this dictated to Siri or something?
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Yup. Most people will never really appreciate how well the TV does on color as long as it's good enough. But many of us will notice that it doesn't have enough connectivity.
My big gripe is smart TVs that have a nice interface for selecting inputs, but don't have enough so you end up needing to use a switch, so you're back to a separate interface for selecting inputs. You can never have enough inputs, but they could be a lot less stingy. If you figure a cable box, a disc player, two gaming systems, and a streaming device, that's five inputs.
Perhaps there's only one game console, but eventually you'll get a new one, and then you may want to play some of the old games. Perhaps the TV has a good streaming solution built-in. Still, you don't want to run out, and adding HDMI ports should be dirt cheap.
Part of the problem has to do with the "white" LEDs used for backlighting the LCD -- the exact nature of their "white" varies slightly from batch to batch. Expensive TVs (usually) make a point of using "white" LEDs that are from the "best" batches/bins (consistency from LED to LED, color purity, etc). Cheap TVs use "white" LEDs from the lower batches/bins. The cheapest Black Friday TVs use whatever LEDs were left over after making the "main" manufacturing run.
So... you might have a TV made by someone like Samsung with a model number like MHD4kQ62 that gets made with the best LEDs... then a model with similar (published) specs that uses the cheaper LEDs & has a model number like MHD4kQ62SXB that sells for $100 less at Best Buy, and an additional model that once again has similar published specs, but uses the cheapest/leftover LEDs, has a model number like MHD4kQ62SVW and sells for $27 less than the Best Buy version at Walmart (possibly with fewer HDMI inputs, just to further spite buyers and shave another 25 cents from the manufacturing cost).
The point is, they don't talk about THOSE performance specs, because they don't WANT to talk about those performance specs. By not talking about them, they can let Walmart have a model that looks almost the same on paper, even if it's egregiously inferior if you saw it side by side with the most expensive variant.
Another area where they often cut corners: the timing circuit that allows a TV to natively deal with 50hz and 60hz, instead of being locked to 50hz OR 60hz native. It only saves a few cents because it's mostly just a few passive components omitted from the mainboard, but they do it anyway (especially with US models) because they know that 98% of US buyers won't notice the difference anyway.
That's the first place I'd look for an explanation. When you actually run a display in HDR mode it drives backlighting to the max and sucks power like crazy. They have to trade flux for colors at least partially to work around the atrocious starting spectrum of backlighting. The only way to do that without eroding contrast is cranking up the volume.
Personally I would much prefer color space not become a selling point unless the metric used explicitly considers power consumption. HDR isn't worth it.
Someone I know took a 4-year degree in computer science without ever touching a terminal. Holey cards, line printers, and batch processing all of the way. Imagine all of that time and having no concept of interactive software.
Bruce Perens.
2) I don't know what it's like with HDR sets, but for other panels I have the impression that there is only a very small handful of actual fabs making the raw panels. That would mean that that the panels themselves are largely identical, so trying to compete on specs is a mugs game. Finished panels, whether it be TVs, monitors or digital signage get sold on brand recognition and marketing schmooze.
3) Consumers, on average, are far more sensitive to price per diagonal inch of screen than they are tech specs, warranty, privacy concerns etc. So that's where vendors focus their efforts.
4) I'm willing to bet that in the professional space, you *can* get proper tech specs for TV's and not just monitors. I don't remember the vendor in question but I recall looking at published specs per panel from a video wall company that was touting HDR upgrades for the TV studio market and they definitely quoted $RGB specs.
5) When all is said and done, unless you have audiophile level addiction to video equipment, it doesn't really matter now does it? The pros want and need calibrated color gamuts because they need to match printer colors, logos need to use correct corporate branded color, need to work on hidef movies where any shortfall in the color gamut of the work flow WILL show up in the final analogue film and so on. For your average user, what are they going to compare the image their living room set displays to? About the only place I can think of it mattering to a residential consumer is either multi-monitor displays (where as long as all panels match each other, you're usually good to go), or video walls for the wealthy and that brings us back to the professional panel vendors. A videophile might want to bask in the knowledge that they spent an extra X grand to make sure they get full sRGB gamut (I don't know of any TV that comes close to 100% of AdobeRGB) but that's a real niche market and one that doesn't seem to attract the same level of "price no object as long as there is pseudo science invoked" silliness of the audiophile segment. Sitting in a living room watching movies, can an average viewer discern even a 5% difference in color gamut if they don't have both panels playing the same thing at the same time?
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"Do they think consumers are too unsophisticated to understand a simple number like "this OLED TV achieves a fairly average 66 percent AdobeRGB coverage?""
Er.... yes?
I had someone ask me what HD was, I've had people watching an SD channel on an HDTV and not realising that it's not "automatically" HD (the HD version of the same channel was higher up in the list), I've had people not understand that the remote control has to point at the TV (increasingly common again as a youth accustomed to Bluetooth are thrown back into an IR world).
Hell, I had one 18-year-old at work bring me their aerial and say "I found this in my room, I dunno what it is do you want it back?" and only correlated this with his lack of TV reception when it was pointed out that it was in fact still necessary to receive digital TV over the air (but they didn't care because they streamed everything).
I couldn't give a shit about sRGB etc. and I'd have to read up on what they even meant without this summary. You can be damn sure that most consumers don't even know what HDR is (they'll think it's something to do with HD!), let alone care about an arbitrary standard to do with it.
"Can I see it from an angle?" will be a question asked a million times more than anything to do with colour calibrations, nits, or anything else.