Why Fireworks Look Really Bad on Your Fancy TV (wired.co.uk) 137
As any seasoned TV watcher will tell you, firework displays don't translate well to television. From a report: In fact, they look terrible. The colors are washed out, the concussive boom of the explosion is dulled into a ridiculous pop, and they have an uncanny knack of looking like CGI. "It's a great torture test of the whole system," says Jeff Yurek of Nanosys, a manufacturer of quantum dot television displays. "There are two problems," explains Tim Brooksbank, a veteran of the audio-visual industry who studies how television displays and transmission work. "The fundamental problem is the dynamic range," says Brooksbank. Dynamic range is the ratio between the largest and smallest levels of colour, light and sound -- as well as time -- that recording, transmission and display equipment are expected to attain. Fireworks test all dynamic ranges to their limits. They're bright, colourful, fast, loud explosions on a black background -- which causes havoc with technology.
"Fireworks need a large dynamic range that exists in nature and -- within reason -- exists in our eyesight," says Brooksbank. "But the whole system within television isn't designed to cope with that range." Take light, for instance. Until recently, digital stills and video cameras have struggled to take decent night time footage, because you're asking a lens to capture intensely dark and intensely bright images in the same frame. So the source footage struggles to accurately represent the brightness and the full colour of a firework. "They're too colourful, they're very bright, and they're very contrasty," explains Yurek. The chemical compounds most commonly used in fireworks emit wavelengths that aren't within the physical possibility of being seen by many TVs.
"Fireworks need a large dynamic range that exists in nature and -- within reason -- exists in our eyesight," says Brooksbank. "But the whole system within television isn't designed to cope with that range." Take light, for instance. Until recently, digital stills and video cameras have struggled to take decent night time footage, because you're asking a lens to capture intensely dark and intensely bright images in the same frame. So the source footage struggles to accurately represent the brightness and the full colour of a firework. "They're too colourful, they're very bright, and they're very contrasty," explains Yurek. The chemical compounds most commonly used in fireworks emit wavelengths that aren't within the physical possibility of being seen by many TVs.
Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
"As any seasoned TV watcher will tell you, firework displays don't translate well to television."
It's never bothered me. Generally, TV shows them well as cameras are usually mounted high up above intervening buildings and people.
The sound is not realistic, sure, but I don't think I actually want that in my living room (or in the flat above).
This just sounds like some tv-fi geek gearing up to tell us we have to replace all our equipment again for no great benefit.
Re:Not really (Score:5, Interesting)
This just sounds like some tv-fi geek gearing up to tell us we have to replace all our equipment again for no great benefit.
I think you cracked the code. I, for one, will not be buying a new TV any time soon.
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I just bought one, because the remote stopped working on the old one and I'm too lazy to get up to turn it on and off.
So I'm set for another 10 years.
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How many people really buy a TV to watch fireworks?
HD+ TV's were really meant to watch sporting events (tiny people running on a big screen) and movies (well focused pictures with a lot of detail)
Fireworks, quality probably isn't a priority.
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I have a 46" plasma with lots of inputs, that's about 10 years old and I got used for a couple hundred$ (about the price of an average new LCD TV, not on sale, in that size range). The picture quality just stomps anything I've seen for under about $1K (i.e. OLEDs), and unlike ALL the LCDs there's no picture deterioration when viewed from the side.
Until I can afford a OLED TV, which might be never the way the prices seem to be going, and as long as the plasma doesn't break, I'm keeping it.
Note: the fireworks
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Yeah, the real reason they look bad is mostly the compression of the signal.
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OTA HD usually channels usually use the full down-stream for ATSC/DVB
Multiple cable/sat channels are always crammed on the same down-stream - lowering the bitrate significantly.
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OLED TV
Bad idea is bad. [zdnet.com]
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"12 year old HD 1080p tv."
gross.
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I can't stand the new TVs (Score:2)
I recoil in horror and disbelief every time I see some show I already am familiar with. Everything looks so brightly lit and shiny.
What it resembles is exactly the look of daytime soap operas. If you have ever seen them you know they have this strange overly lit and saturated look that's hard to explain. I suspect that historically it may havebeen that Soaps were video and most TV was still from film. But that's not entirely it since news broadcasts were also video and lacked that plastic look.
I saw the
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Orange face powder (Score:2)
On TV people where orange tinged face powder to make themselves look normal. Many TV shows film nighttime scenes in daylight then process the images to make it night. When filming stopped down for sharp ling focuses they add more light. And even outside they use mirrors to add more daylight to the foregroung actors. So seeing it as it is seen by the camera itself is never the goal, it's seeing as it was intended to look that is the goal.
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Probably, but no one does. I suffer because of the TVs in other people houses and bars, and everywhere. When you go to buy one they are all turned on and you can't change it to see what it should look like. Plus the controls are bewildering anyhow.
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Yes, and many people do. IN fact, it's recommended you do it. Every tv can turn it off.
Every place I went was more then happy to turn it on and off. Which is great because you can compare it to other tvs.
" Plus the controls are bewildering anyhow."
lol
Are you sure your should be on a nerd site? Doe the setting of your browser also confuse you? Is you VCR blinking 12:00 ?
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Panny (VT60) owner here as well. Which GoT episode was that?
Like you, I'm not spending another $2K for OLED anytime soon just to get "true blacks".
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I'm pretty sure that 16-235 is an approximation of the original NTSC broadcast-safe black level (7.5 IRE).
Now that there are few if any devices that use analog video, there's no reason to leave out such a huge range of values, so video can use all 256 values. Whether TVs handle this correctly is the matter of concern, but most TVs out of the box have terrible contrast and color settings.
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Black crush was caused by consumers with incorrectly adjusted brightness
Indeed. Like anyone with a Plasma or an OLED watching footage in the incorrect colour space. You can't simply stretch content designed for a 300:1 contrast ratio to something higher. The worst example of this could be seen in early Dolby Vision cinemas with movies which weren't mastered on a Dolby Vision compatible monitor. It looked okay to everyone on their normal screens calibrated for a 300:1 contrast ratio of most cinemas, but watch it on the Dolby Cinema and you experience black crush at best and comp
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Alistair Stewart has aged since I last saw him on TV in the 1990s)
That is how age works.
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thanks ITV News, and OMG Alistair Stewart has aged since I last saw him on TV in the 1990s)
I was a tab shocked at how he'd aged also...
...but not at ITV cutting to commercial half way through the display (some things never change...)
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Especially when all you get to see otherwise is adverts showing you how much better the new TV looks .... on your current TV.
Funny, the only adverts I see are for various aging-related health products and lawyers wanting me to sign on to some lawsuit. Oh yes, and a couple of local ambulance-chaser specialists. Unfortunately, on OTA TV, those adverts take up about as much time per hour as the shows I want to watch. PBS is a blessing because all the advertising is grouped at the beginning and end of the shows where it's easily avoided, except during the bimonthly pledge drives that preempt all normal schedules with specials and inf
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They don't want answer, they just want to complain.
There use to be a group that brought up they don't watch any TV when every they could.
They have been replaced by a group the goes out of there way to mention they still have a tube TV.
As if that is either smart or cool.
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They have been replaced by a group the goes out of there way to mention they still have a tube TV.
I miss my old Phillips 31" tube TV. My bedroom was 4 or 5 degrees warmer with that thing running in there. It was also really good at making sure my dresser didn't go anywhere. In a pinch I could have used it to barricade my door. My LCD doesn't do any of that, and the picture is better. It's a shame, really.
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sub 100 for a tv is inexpensive.
ALWAYS has been inexpensive for a tv.
"but I don't want to dedicate a wall to the thing"
how are you not dedicating a wall to put your tube TV in front of?
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These ones [youtube.com] look great on my screen. Maybe the problem is the recording distance.
But now seriously, you're correct, the different reasons are built up to sell new hardware. The article gives three main reasons for the "lack of quality":
- High Dynamic Range, and turning dynamic contrast on to improve it by software.
- Wide colour gamut, specifically the one in BT.2020.
- High frame rate.
- (Bonus) Noise reduction should be disabled.
Coincidentally, the article cites the opinion of the Director of Marketing of a q
Humbling! (Score:2)
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I'd go the opposite way. That we are able to see and hear things that are as loud and bright as fireworks is not a a great feat for the human sensory system.
What is surprising is that TV works at all. It is nowhere near reality. It is a small, flat screen, only capable of showing 3 vaguely monochromatic colors, the dynamic range is laughable, and it conveys motion with 24 still frames/sec. The only thing we are getting right is the resolution, and it is a recent development. As for the sound, you are gettin
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I am getting the sound from 9 reasonably sized membranes, thank you very much.
Buying a TV for the built in speaker makes as much sense as buying a computer monitor for the built in speakers.
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As if people would leave it.
"death of the human race"
lol, no.
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That's not all folks (Score:5, Interesting)
Mostly fireworks look terrible because it exposes the lunacy of the relentless pursuit of ridiculously low bitrate channels used by most broadcasters. You just can't fit that kind of scene into that sized channel.
Re:That's not all folks (Score:4, Interesting)
More like a limit of DCT-based compression. DCT is very good for encoding large areas of repetitive patterns, because that's how most scenes look like.
But fireworks are not like that, they are made of tiny, extremely bright dots, and DCT, and frequency-based transforms in general make a mess out of these scenes. We could design a compression scheme optimized for fireworks, I am thinking something wavelet-based, but that would be a lot of work and resources for a very specific case, compression has always been about tradeoffs.
As for low bitrate channels, it is not lunacy, bandwidth is a precious resource, especially in broadcasting where the EM spectrum is shared by everyone. So you definitely want to compress as much as possible.
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especially in broadcasting where the EM spectrum is shared by everyone
That's the unlicensed bands.
Licensed bands, on the contrary, consist only of spectrum that is exclusively licensed to individual license holders. e.g. WNYW holds an exclusive license to broadcast on UHF channel 27 in Manhattan. They don't have to share that band with anyone, and it's solely their choice to compress their video feeds enough to allow four separate video streams to be multiplexed (one 720p, the other three 480i) within it. Then, when you consider cable TV providers and the excessive compress
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Thanks for this. Makes sense. Strip the least significant part of the DCT, Where the tiny dots end up! Too bad we live in a world short on basic math skills.
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What's needed is to improve our compression algorithms so they can recognize a high-contra
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I suspect we could create one just for fireworks. The big question to me is: Why are people still fascinated with fireworks?
"a veteran of the audio-visual industry" (Score:2)
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"But the whole system within television isn't designed to cope with that range." Never heard or HDR? https://www.whathifi.com/advic... [whathifi.com]
No, he's going on about this instead:
BT.2020’s colour gamut is far wider than any existing TV technology, able to capture more than 99 per cent of all the colours in the world as measured by a researcher called MR Pointer, who collected more than 4,000 objects found in nature during the 1970s to record their colours.
Re:"a veteran of the audio-visual industry" (Score:4, Informative)
The other thing that limits the color gamut is the black level. The purer the color the less light is present in other wavelengths. The purest colors are on the curved edge of the chromaticity diagram, and they consist of just one wavelength of light. A high black level shifts all colors inwards toward gray. Even if a TV set has very pure primary colors, a high black level shrinks the reproducible color gamut. If you want purer colors, the first thing you want to look for is a high contrast and a low black level, not some encoding standard with a bigger theoretical gamut.
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The other thing that limits the color gamut is the black level. The purer the color the less light is present in other wavelengths. The purest colors are on the curved edge of the chromaticity diagram, and they consist of just one wavelength of light. A high black level shifts all colors inwards toward gray. Even if a TV set has very pure primary colors, a high black level shrinks the reproducible color gamut. If you want purer colors, the first thing you want to look for is a high contrast and a low black level, not some encoding standard with a bigger theoretical gamut.
Doesn't OLED have this licked by providing an infinite contrast ratio (black level of 0)?
Lens? (Score:4, Informative)
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That used to be true, but software tricks like HDR are allowing us to surpass the inherent dynamic range limits of the sensor hardware. The limitation is increasingly becoming the dynamic range of the display device. Primarily LCD technology which is limited to about 1500:1 or 2000:1 contrast ratio (the tricks for dynamic contrast ratio are limited to blocks of the screen, so don't work for small br
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Except you're not accounting for the noise floor if your lens can't get enough light to the sensor.
Typical Slashdot response (Score:4, Interesting)
An article talking about limits of dynamic range and colour reproduction, the kind of technological angle that should get nerds excited, and all the posts so far (and a large number of the posts to come) are from a bunch of whinging grumps who are happy with their old mediocre sets.
What are you people even doing here since you're clearly not nerds.
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Most people do not see it as a practical way of spending their money and most people would barely be able to tell there was a difference between the two.
Just about anything can be made better with newer technology/more money.
Re: Typical Slashdot response (Score:2)
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Not to mention people who receive a 4K TV as a gift to replace a CRT SDTV and then just leave it in crop-o-vision because they don't want to pay the HD surcharge on the monthly cable bill.
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Actually, you can get a better 1080p HDTV signal over the air than you can get on any of the Seattle cable services, all of which deliver 1080i.
So, it might not be your TV, it's that you're not using the free HDTV antenna on your HDTV, so you get a lower resolution, interlaced.
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An article talking about limits of dynamic range and colour reproduction, the kind of technological angle that should get nerds excited, and all the posts so far (and a large number of the posts to come) are from a bunch of whinging grumps who are happy with their old mediocre sets.
What are you people even doing here since you're clearly not nerds.
There are nerds, and there are nerds. They aren't all alike.
Me, I like nerdy plots and characterization. I never once watched my plain old TV and thought "dang, this would be so much better if i could see these wooden actors' pores."
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But why are the nerds no interested i this topic polluting the thread with there bullshit?
But you're one of those idiots that think anyone interested in a thing is also a nerd, so.. you're pointless.
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But why are the nerds no interested i this topic polluting the thread with there bullshit?
But you're one of those idiots that think anyone interested in a thing is also a nerd, so.. you're pointless.
Uh, OK. Pleasure talking to you ...
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Even nerds are getting fed up with newer, flashier, "smart" technology. I never want to upgrade anything anymore, because the new stuff is gimped garbage designed to fall apart in a year, assuming the mandatory subscription and integrated spyware even lasts that long.
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"technobabble "
two things:
1) None of it was technobabble.
2) Just because you can't understand it, doesn't make it technobabble. It means you are ignorant; which is fine. Then you defend you ignorance with nonsense instead of actually trying to understand; which is what a nerd would do.
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"The chemical compounds most commonly used in fireworks emit wavelengths that aren’t within the physical possibility of being seen by many TVs."
I know what he means there, but that's an oversimplification. The wavelengths of almost all colors aren't within the physical possibilities of TVs and other display devices, old or new. That's because display devices recreate a perception of a color, not a color. They create a mix of three (rarely more)
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" I just bought a $1500 mediocre TV"
$1500 on a mediocre TV? you were taken.
The point you missed, is this: "Why are you in this thread if it is of no interest to you?"
Literally people not interested come in and bitch about why they aren't interested.
Almost like they are desperately trying not to be left out.
"$6500 is over-the-top specs that will not affect my viewing experience and isn't supported by the technologies delivering the content anyways.."
so,, you actually know nothing about TVs then?
Scale and presence (Score:3)
Lots of things don't look as good on TV (ANY TV) as they do in real life, but most things we watch on TV have other aspects to them not related to explicitly the visuals and audio (drama, story, emotion, etc...). Fireworks only exist to look cool in the night sky. They have never and probably never will look "as good" on TV as they do in real life. The scale is completely off - something that is impressive as a massive explosion of lights in the sky loses a lot when it's shrunk down for a television. And there is a great deal of presence lost as well. The same issues occur with live concerts. While you can appreciate a live concert on TV, it loses so much in the translation that it's a completely different (and worse) experience.
VR would be the only solution I can think of that would come close. AR, maybe, but you'd still lose much of the feeling of presence with AR.
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Exactly so.
With the presence alone, large shells can explode to over 500 feet across, and many displays launch over a thousand feet into the air. A TV screen five feet across can't compare. VR headsets can emulate the size and scale, so that's something.
Many of the compounds burn incredibly brightly. As one of many chemicals flaring to light, magnesium burns bright enough it can blind humans. It's only because of the distance that we can tolerate the brightness of many fireworks at all. Mass-market screens
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The spaceship on my tv look far better then any spaceship in real life!
Fireworks don't look good on any TV (Score:2)
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In Seattle we walk to the fireworks, and then have suburbanites who don't pay to build our roads block the roads from being crossed by pedestrians so their fancy climate-destroying cars can leave, resulting in ten minute waits to cross the street, even though there are 20 times more pedestrians that cross in one cycle than all the empty single-passenger suburban cars they let through, due to the traffic jams.
TAKE BACK THE STREETS WE SEATTLEITES PAID FOR!
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You don't think tax dollar for you streets also come from the state? and that those people aren't buying thing in the city?
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Nope. I don't.
I've noticed they tend to buy their gas outside the city where it's cheaper, and we Blue cities are carrying them as suburban tax leeches.
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I just thought because people were stuck in a tradition, and 'tradition' means thing we don't think about, just do.
Q: What's a Fancy TV? (Score:2)
Q: What's a fancy TV?
A: The one msmash doesn't have, thus he puts that dig in the headline.
C'mon, try better.
TVs now obliged to show carbon emission (Score:2)
If you want your shows to look good, only view stuff with low emissions.
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You can see them in New Zealand from the Australian fires, if you want.
It's melting the New Zealand glaciers.
It's the video compression you idiot! (Score:5, Informative)
So there you go... (Score:2)
...if you TV innovators need some reason to sell a new TV set every 3 years, solve THAT fidelity issue before you try to convince us that we all desperately need 3D tv or curved screens.
Video compression... (Score:2)
Hi-def smoke if you watch in the UK... (Score:2)
I dunno, the smoke tnat obliterated [metro.co.uk] the London Eye on my 4K OLED TV looked really good :-) I must say, I hadn't laughed so hard at something on the BBC for years!
Seattle didn't have fireworks this year (Score:2)
I'm thinking the reason why the fireworks didn't look that good in Seattle this year is because the high winds meant we all had to watch the fireworks from Yellowknife instead.
You insensitive clod!
Who the hell watches fireworks on TV? (Score:2)
As a sidebar to this (ridiculous, pointless) subject: Try watching rain falling on the ground on a modern TV, especially if it's being played from a DVD or BluRay disc, but even OTA compression applies here: you'll see all sorts of compression artifacts because of the randomness of rainfall, and the fact there's so much motion. Only so much bandwidth to go around.
Who the hell watches fireworks? (Score:2)
Seriously, what's the point of that?
Really? (Score:2)
And here I thought the reason was that fireworks displays were just inherently boring.
OLED is Great but... (Score:2)
...I just bought the 2019 4K LG 65â LED Smart TV from CostCo for $450. Couldnâ(TM)t be happier. Blacks arenâ(TM)t the deepest, but itâ(TM)s such a great picture for the money.
Best of all it supports HDR content.
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...I just bought the 2019 4K LG 65Ã LED Smart TV from CostCo for $450. CouldnÃ(TM)t be happier. Blacks arenÃ(TM)t the deepest, but itÃ(TM)s such a great picture for the money.
Best of all it supports HDR content.
OLED and HDR is an oxymoron.
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Re:OLED is Great but... (Score:5, Informative)
I guess all those Dolby Vision HDR reference OLED monitors don't exist then? You know, the LG and Sony units...
No $450 OLED display will do even 1000 nits. Instead there is an ongoing scam of apologists saying OLED is HDR too because black levels.
MicroLED can't come soon enough. OLED as a technology is a dead end. Too unreliable, not daylight visible and lifespan is unacceptably short vs. competing display technologies.
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No, they are not.
I'd explain why, but I'm not which word you don't know the definition of.
You are being scammed (Score:2)
"The fundamental problem is the dynamic range"
This is fundamentally bullshit. If I can download still images of fireworks that look nice and display them on a non HDR display the problem cannot be dynamic range.
The problem of substance is bit starved CBR rather than CRF encoding universally used for broadcasting.
HDR is nice and all yet generally in most scenes it makes no difference at all. What people who think its the greatest thing ever are reacting to are different profiles with more aggressive satura
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How about you use the whole quote, and not just cut it off so you can make a post to try and trick people into thinking you are knowledgeable?
The fundamental problem is the dynamic range,” says Brooksbank. Dynamic range is the ratio between the largest and smallest levels of colour, light and sound – as well as time – that recording, transmission and display equipment are expected to attain. Fireworks test all dynamic ranges to their limits. They’re bright, colourful, fast, loud exp
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How about you use the whole quote, and not just cut it off so you can make a post to try and trick people into thinking you are knowledgeable?
Dynamic range is the ratio between the largest and smallest levels of colour, light and sound
I stand by my quote. It is not necessary to enumerate what dynamic range means because everyone knows what it means. Sound has nothing to do with how things look.
Neither is "time - that recording, transmission and display equipment are expected to attain". I reject the notion time is in any way relevant to the issue at hand from a display perspective with IPS or OLED panel because there is no technical basis for it. There is no appreciable inter-frame hysteresis. If a static image of fireworks can be d
New Label Needed (Score:2)
Who cares? (Score:2)
If you have seen one, you have seen them all.
Love, American Style (Score:2)
High Dynamic Range is not an issue... (Score:2)
What a load of crap (Score:2)
Fireworks almost always looked fine using plain old broadcast NTSC cameras and CRTs. This is a system with far less color reproduction capability than today's HDTV. Why did it work? Because professionals were operating the equipment who knew how to use the equipment to the fullest within its limitations.
It's a complete load of horse-shit that modern digital TV cameras and displays can't display fireworks. They may not be able to display the colors with perfect accuracy, but they can still look great if on
TV could do better (Score:2)
HDR has the potential for offering a better presentation of fireworks. HDR on a MicroLED display (which can have really black blacks; OLED can also do that but it doesn't get bright enough for full HDR) will get us even closer. HDR on LCD doesn't work as well because it depends on local dimming to enhance contrast, and fireworks are a type of content where local dimming does not behave well because of the extremely high local contrast. (You end up with halos around the firework bursts.)
As for the dynamic ra
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Notice this is from wired.co.uk... in the UK they don't let SkyTV have as much bandwidth as the USA's DirecTV service.
DirecTV looks like pure shit, so I can't imagine TV being even worse. That's terrible. Also, he touches on that sort of:
It is theoretically possible to improve the quality of images by reducing the number of channels crammed into the same broadcast range. But for TV companies who make their money selling adverts, it makes little sense to do so for such outliers.
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DirecTV - AT&T keeps trying to get me to sign on, I keep throwing away the junk mail.
On place I occasionally visit, all of the affordable lodging has DirecTV. It's unwatchable. Even on cheap hotel TVs (many branded as "RCA"), it's unwatchable. And good luck even finding something to watch - hundreds of channels, nearly all carrying notices asking you for more money to be able to watch it. I shudder to think of what AT&T is charging those places, but it must be less than the real cable company or the
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There's some flash memory in your standard non-smart HDTV, and when CBS had the Boston Pops Fireworks, they had to activate this system including asking Fremantle for a limited bandwidth episode of The Price is Right... this was debated when ATSC was being talked about years ago on Slashdot.
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Most modern digital TV is buffered, buffering is a trade off over analog signals. Primarily most TV Data is video compressed. Because for a 4k display to be broadcasted in real time would require hundreds of GBs of bandwidth to be shown. Image compression needs a buffer so It knows what to compress and how.
Sending 4k in analog would be very prone to interference, as the waveform will have to be very small, and difficult to average out.
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Whenever I hear that something real looks like CG on a modern TV (never ever heard that during the CRT era) I assume it has something to do with motion smoothing. Fireworks aren't persistent objects, which is what motion smoothing works best with. They appear, and can change, almost in an instant and tend to have a lot of noise/sparkle. Smoothing out both of these traits seemingly should make them look less lifelike.
It's almost like you didn't read the article:
Many TVs have two features, often called MPEG noise reduction and transient noise reduction, or TNR. These are two systems designed to smooth out fast-moving changes in images brought about by compression, or by boosting up low-quality broadcast signals. But we don’t really have low-quality broadcast signals anymore, and you rarely see “noise” (blocky or snowy images) on TVs anymore. Keeping these on stops the display reacting to fast-moving changes in the image – which is exactly what fireworks are. Unless they’re turned off, the rapid burst of a firework could flag up a false positive as interference on the signal.