What's in a name? UltraHD takes the leap for more than just pixels.

[Mondozei]

For the longest of times, I've been wishing that we've been focusing on more than just high resolution. Raja of AMD:

AMD’s Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect for the RTG, says the division is working on graphics products that can deliver both “fast pixels” and “deep pixels.”

Fast pixels being high resolution, deep pixels being image quality. Remember AMD's reveal back in November?
It was all about HDR and similar things.

Flash forward to today, the Ultra HD alliance is finally going on the same track:

“The diverse group of UHDA companies agreed that to realize the full potential of Ultra HD the specs need to go beyond resolution and address enhancements like HDR, expanded color and ultimately even immersive audio. Consumer testing confirmed this,” said UHD Alliance President Hanno Basse

You can read the whole thing here , skim the early part for the details.

This will make it (easier) to buy a monitor, since resolution isn't the same thing as IQ, as we all know. Recall that AMD stated that getting a 1080p HDR is a bigger deal for visual image quality than 4K SDR.

For Ultra HD, the new specs include:

• Image Resolution: 3840x2160
• Color Bit Depth: 10-bit signal
• Color Palette (Wide Color Gamut)
  • Signal Input: BT.2020 color representation
  • Display Reproduction: More than 90% of P3 colors

And for HDR

High Dynamic Range

• SMPTE ST2084 EOTF
• A combination of peak brightness and black level either:
  • More than 1000 nits peak brightness and less than 0.05 nits black level
    OR
  • More than 540 nits peak brightness and less than 0.0005 nits black level

Getting 10 bit standardised is a huge win even if you can't afford HDR.

 

[hawtdawg]

HDR forcing TV's to support high static contrast will improve picture quality as much as anything.