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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
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
Because 99.95% of consumers don't give a shit.
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?
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
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.
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.
"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.