Dolby Executive Indicates Brightness Is Next TV Tech Battleground

Megalith

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Am I the only one who doesn’t care how bright a display is, particularly a TV? Now that I have an OLED, I always watch movies and game with the lights off—and even with the brightness and “backlight” dialed down, bright scenes still often feel blinding.

Dolby’s Vice President of Technology, Patrick Giffis, said that he expects television manufacturers to now start competing with one another to produce the brightest displays. Although the current standard that needs to be reached for Ultra HD Premium's HDR specification is 1,000 nits (where one nit is equal to the amount of light a candle produces), Giffis believes television manufacturers will soon go much higher. “Have no doubt about it, the nits race is on. It will be 2,000 nit displays, and I suspect before too long, 4,000 nit consumer displays,” he said.
 
I think it depends on use.

For serious movie watching, you are going to want to be in a dark room anyway, in which case brightness is moot. For my Samsung JS9000 I use as a monitor, I have the backlight set to 7 out of 20. 20 is a mostly meaningless setting, as I feel like I am just scorching my eyeballs. It is painful.

That being said, there are many people who use their TV's for other things than serious movie watching, like watching the news in a bright sunny room. In cases like that, I can see where having higher brightness settings might be helpful.
 
3D, 4K, britghtness.. any marketing gimmick for suckers to buy into to distract them from the fact theres nothing worth watching
 
It depends. If when talking about "brightness" we are talking about the full spectrum of light, then yes it's very important to me. I like deep blacks, which is why the first batch of LCDs after switching from CRTs looked so terrible to me and why I went with a plasma TV. LCD/LED is much better than it was but still not as good as the old CRTs.
 
I care about brightness, because I have a dual-setup which I highly recommend.

I have a LCD for daytime/bright-room viewing, and for dim/dark room viewing, I have a nice big projector screen that drops right over the TV and the huge image cannot be beat (you don't realize how small even a 65" TV is until you have a 100"+ drop down in front of it), with the convenience of Alexa voice command and a Logitech Harmony Hub (just say "Alexa turn on projector" and it lowers the electric screen while turning off the TV and turning on projector and switching inputs and turning off the lights in the room). Love it!

Nothing rocks more than playing Civ 6 from the couch on a giant projected screen! But projectors suck ass in bright rooms, so the LCD combo kicks ass for that.
 
This is important for color reproduction. I'm sure it has some benefits for bright rooms but that is mostly a non point right now.
 
Actually brightness (nits) can be extremely important if you care about reducing motion blur. If you want to get anywhere close to CRT-grade motion clarity you have to strobe (aka flash, aka turn the image on and off rapidly) the display. Of course, if you do that you dramatically reduce the amount of light coming from the display, so you either need to increase light output to compensate or turn off all the lights in the room. Unfortunately, today's 200-400 nit displays are too dim to make even the latter an option (image quality becomes ass).

Three things really suffered with the transition to LCD displays: color quality, contrast, and motion clarity. The HDR standard will (eventually) will fix the first two things. Motion clarity is the logical next step, and for that you need much brighter displays, as well as much higher framerate content.
 
3D, 4K, britghtness.. any marketing gimmick for suckers to buy into to distract them from the fact theres nothing worth watching
Seriously? There's more quality programming on TV (with or without Netflix) than I can recall at any other time. There's great shows that I'll never see, because I just don't have the time to watch them all. Outside of the world of [H], this is considered the 2nd Golden Age of television.
 
We will know this screen brightness thing has gone too far when Best Buy turns off all the store lights and just uses the light from the TV displays.
Historically, TVs have had brightness/contrast cranked up out of the box to look good under fluorescent lights. If they're turning off all the lights, then that's a sign that that's no longer the case, because a super bright TV without light is blinding. That said, I don't think the Best Buy's I've been in turn off all the lights. Fry's does in the TV section (and they've done that for at least 10 years, as I recall).
 
Brightness is important for HDR. In a SDR a 1000 nits and over is blinding because everything gets brighter when you turn the brightness up. In HDR the average brightness is still around dark room comfortable 100-200 nits but the high brightness headroom is needed for highlights and color reproduction to make the picture more lifelike, which SDR is a far cry from.
 
I think I'll just keep my J6200 for a while :) All this new tech to make it more "lifelike" is harming more than helping from my point of view anyway. I read an article not that long ago on why Tru-Motion looks so weird for some people. When you have perfect motion and 60 fps, it looks fake, an uncanny valley experience. Our minds at 24fps are meant to fill in the blanks, and we use our imagination. When it becomes too lifelike, it is unnerving. I tried watching star wars with all the bells and whistles on with a Samsung 4K and you could absolutely tell it was a set, everything was way to clear and smooth - in the words of Han Solo, it looked Hokey. I replaced it with the J6200 and turned down the soap opera effect until it just removed any blurring. Looks great!
 
They have to have something new to sell us. Otherwise all of those 1080p televisions people bought 3-4 years ago could last indefinitely.
While HDR is certainly an important progression, it's going to come down to content that uses it properly and having a standard so we don't have too many haves/have-nots.
 
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