Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware on box today's view is not the usual sort of content I make on the channel it's gonna be more discussion addressing some of the common misconceptions about HDR technology that I hear in comments and foreign person I guess all that sort of thing I guess there's more hjm owners become available and as I get into reviewing the asou speech a 20-7 you cued it's important to know what exactly you need to look for when purchasing an HDR monitor so I'm going to talk about that today don't expect too much b-roll or anything like that just a nice juicy talk about HDR the things I'll be talking about in this discussion come from a number of sources firstly my personal experiences in HDR monitors and TVs of all kinds but also keep people in the industry involved with developing HDR displays working on HDR support for cheap using that sort of thing and also validating HDR morale is not just for consumers but also for movie studios in Hollywood so a lot of information from a variety of people is going to go into this video and as far as I'm concerned there are three main pillars to HDR technology you've got your color space brightness and contrast and it's important to note how these pillars to HDR improve the viewing experience relative to SDR tech which has been used I guess for a long long time now I'm gonna start with brightness because this is the area I hear I guess the most misconception is about common things that people say include you know hgr monitors need to support a thousand it's of brightness or 400 nits of sustained or white brightness isn't high enough and even you know it's not real HDR unless it's 4000 nits and all of those statements aren't really true so it's really important to know exactly how brightness affects HDR content and what to look for in a monitors brightness specifications to ensure your HDR cable display is well suited to HDR content most of the discussion on HJ brightness comes from two misconceptions of sorts the first round is what people believe to be high levels of brightness and what isn't and the second is around what companies are mastering their content for and they're both kind of intertwine it is true that the HDR standards like HDR 10 and Dolby vision have brightness targets and maximum levels ranging anywhere from 10,000 nits to a thousand it's it's true that many studios creating HDR content during their content for high levels of brightness like 4,000 nits and it's also true there plenty of high-end TVs can currently produce well above a thousand nits at peak so how relevant is this stuff for monitors in particular well firstly on HDR standards and mastering it's not necessary if you're displa to support the full range of the standard or the exact specs used in the content mastering so long as your display is able to correctly map from a wider brightness range down to whatever the display supports there are differences in how HDR displays handle this mapping but as long as it's done I guess to a reasonable degree and everything is scaled or clip properly the content will pretty good on a display that can't hit those super high levels of brightness of course if the display does a bad job you might run into issues like standard brightness areas being too darkest you know everything gets scaled down inappropriately or you might run into severe clipping at the top end of the brightness scale with significant detail loss luckily for gamers on HDR monitors this is less of an issue compared to video content as most games included scales and sliders to adjust how the HDR image looks in your TV and allows you to get the most out of your displays capabilities now if you display can show high levels of brightness like four thousand or even ten thousand nits that's great higher is better but lower levels of brightness aren't nearly as bad as you might think the difference between a thousand nits and 4,000 hits sounds massive and the difference from six hundred minutes to four thousand it's even larger but the human eye is nonlinear in the way it perceives brightness in other words while the jump from a thousand hits to four thousand it sounds like a four times increase the eye does not perceive with four thousand it's is four times brighter it will perceive a four times difference between say fifteen it's and two hundred nits but as brightness increases your eye becomes less sensitive to large changes in light output the result is four thousand it's only appears to most viewers is a small increase over a thousand despite the large change in number crucially for HDR monitors the effect also applies below a thousand s according to some experts I spoke to that are involved with professionally testing HDR displays the difference between 600 nits and a thousand it's in a typical viewing environment for a monitor isn't all that large in fact many viewers will only notice a small difference or even no difference between those two brightnesses in an indoor artificially lit room and that's where most monitors are viewed the difference gets even harder to spot in dark environments like with the lights off another important factor in this is that monitors are viewed at closer distances than TVs a relatively large TV viewed from a typical couch distance in a brightly lit living room during the day requires a much higher brightness output to deliver the same HDR effect as a monitor viewed more closely and in a more dimly lit room so while the TV may benefit from sake for thousands of people artists a monitor could give an equivalent viewing experience with a thousand nits or less one expert I spoke to suggested that four monitors the difference between 600 nits and thousands of peak brightness is fast more than most people realize in typical viewing environments and 600 nits should be perfectly adequate for a good HDR experience provided the monitor hits several other key metrics we'll talk about later even for hundreds of peak brightness could be fine in some scenarios although most people believe that around this 600 nits mark corresponding to the display HDR 600 specification is your safe spot I guess for great HDR with a thousand hits or more providing a small improvement on that the other very very important thing to note is the difference between peak brightness and sustained brightness I hear a ridiculous amount of complaints of that hgl monitors rated 4000 it's or 600 nits of peak brightness being incapable of displaying that level of brightness across the entire display in a full white image for a sustained period of time the complaints usually paint those brightness figures as false advertising when the monitor might only be able to push 300 minutes across the full white image the truth is that for almost all content you'll actually view on the display the full white brightness figure is irrelevant and for HDR in particular is the peak brightness figure that matters if you think of content you typically view like a game a TV show or movie how often is this screen entirely white very rarely and then on top of that how often do you think a content creator working in HDR wants to display a full white image and eye scorching a thousand nits for a long time and the answer that's pretty much never so the reason why HDR needs high brightness levels is for flashes of brightness high brightness enables you know the intensity of the Sun to burn through the flicker of fire to illuminate a screen or an explosion to rock your eyes more closely matching how those things are experienced in real to show those elements in their full glory you only need a display capable of pushing high levels of brightness in a small area or for a short period a thousand nits in a ten percent white area along with the ability to show a thousand it's across the entire display for a split second those are typical metrics failure is fine for 99% of HDR content and it's these metrics that the peak brightness Vig you see in HDR monitors specs refers to and like I said earlier you don't even need that figure to be a thousand it's instead of 600 nits is fine if you want to look further into why high levels of sustained brightness is not required you should look into a metric called average picture level or APL which describes the average brightness of a complex image for a lot of video content and games the APL is actually pretty low relative to full white images it's only really in desktop usage like browsing the web or editing documents that you run into hi APL content and for that you really don't want a high level of rightness trust me viewing web pages or even just 400 nits on a monitor in indoor conditions is pretty painful so for brightness there are a couple of things you need to look for don't worry if the monitor can't sustain high levels of brightness 300 nits also is fine but to be on the safe side and recommend looking for 600 nits of peak brightness is a minimum with a thousand it's providing a small improvement if you are planning to use the monitor in a brighter more well-lit environment having high levels of peak brightness like a thousand hits will benefit you more but for most users 600 nits is fine you might be wondering will you get a good experience with a 400 nits monitor meaning the display HDR 400 spec well there so that is maybe but there are a few other issues with the display HDR 400 spec that we'll get into in a moment that leads me towards recommending the higher just by HDR 600 spec as a minimum and at least in my experience 600 niches are noticeable jump from 400 nits and worth upgrading to and I found that monitors that can hit 600 nits are more likely to support other key HDR features that 400 nits monitors often do not for the second of the three pillars contrast I think most people on the same page with this one one of the key benefits to HDR is its ability to display bright areas and dark areas on the screen at the same time giving you that you know stunning difference between the dark shadows of a street with the bright streetlights for example this range of brightness is or dynamic range higher than with SDI imagery and HDR hence why it's called high dynamic range as with most things higher contrast is always better but the key thing to note with HDR is that you really want a contrast ratio that exceeds five thousand to one for the best results even ten thousand to one is really sort of around that mark so there is a significant difference between the brightest brights and the darkest blacks basically every monitor uses an LCD panel and even the best LCD panels out there using VA technology can't really push that much above 3000 to 1 contrast ratio so there abouts therefore to produce a good HDR a display need to support a technology called local dimming what local dimming provides is instead of getting the crystal from the LCD panel to attenuate the amount of light passing through as with standard LCDs local dimming augments this by also allowing sections of the backlight itself to dim when you combine a backlight they can dim in certain sections with the inherent design of LCDs you can achieve very high contrast ratios ideally you'd want the backlight to be dimmable on a per pixel level however that's not currently possible outside of expensive industry reference monitors so the next best thing is to have as many dimming zones as possible you've probably heard of the new g-sync HDR monitors supporting 384 FA LD zones or full array local dimming zones and that's a good number for a monitor size display you'll get a great HDR experience with that amount of backlight control there's no exact number for how many zones you need for good HDR aside from more is always better but it's pretty clear that if you only have a few zones say a single-digit amount like 6 that the HDR experience from that won't be great most displays that support local dimming will advertise it as a feature so my advice is to look for local dimming support and then try and research the amount of zones the backlight has if that number is reasonable at least upper double digits you'll be on your way towards good HDR and it's also important I guess to avoid monitors that only support edge local dimming rather than full array though most high zone count displays will already be full array dimmed unfortunately the display HDR tears don't have rigid specifications for the amount of local dimming zones while the 600 and 1,000 tears must support local dimming form to meet their contrast ratio metrics low zone edge-lit Deming does qualify meanwhile local dimming is not a requirement for display HDR 400 at all so be wary of that tier color gamut is the third pillar of HDR again I think most people understand what is required here true hgl monitors should be able to display more colors than SDR monitors xgr stone is a future proof in this regard that they support way more constant current display technologies can show for example the ridiculously massive bt 2020 color space but realistically so long as the display can show a decent amount more colors you'll notice the difference in color depth and vibrance compared to an SDR display with today's monitor technologies in mind you should be looking for monitors that support at least a hundred and twenty-five percent of the srgb dammit use for SDR usually that will mean upwards of 90 percent DCI p3 coverage of course larger is always better so long as the display properly Maps colors to what it can produce monitors that are validated to the display HD are 600 tears and above a guaranteed to support 90% of the DCI p3 gamut or more so you should again be looking for those badges however display HDR 400 is a bit dodgy and then it doesn't stipulate a higher than srgb color gamut so be wary of that most monitors that use quantum dot technology will hit those higher gamuts too so that's a good thing to look for one misconception I do hear quite often though relates to 10-bit color 10-bit color is a requirement for HDR so all monitors that support HG are would at least be able to support 10 bit data input for processing essentially this gives the monitor greater color depth and a wider range of colors compared to 8-bit processing which again improves image quality however what isn't required is a true 10 bit panel this is a professional-grade feature only needed for people mastering content and doing other color critical work it's also an expensive technology to include with most true 10 bit panels starting at well over $1000 without any fancy features like high refresh rates or local dimming backlight some don't even support HDR is no true things that we've been talking about today most HG our monitor panel supporting 10-bit color will display these cars using a technique called frame rate control or FRC on top of an 8-bit panel you'll find it very difficult to tell the difference in any real-world scenario between true 10-bit and 8bit plus FRC it's much harder to notice them panels that use six bit plus FRC to achieve 8-bit colors for example for gaming and viewing video content 8-bit plus FRC is basically a non-issue so don't worry about it a couple of other things before I close this one off I often get asked about OLED monitors as all that is one of the best technologies for hgi TVs due to its outstanding contrast ratio and effective ability to per pixel dim while it'd be nice to have an all that monitor for gaming and watching HDR videos the truth is all that is not really well suited to a monitor OLED struggles with image retention otherwise known as burnin so in a desktop environment items like the taskbar on windows could quite easily burn in overtime this isn't as much of a problem with TVs where most of the contents just video or games there are other issues as well like for white power consumption and different sub pixel sizes but the mainland for monitors is that image retention issue I also want to make a brief mention of chroma subsampling which is an issue with current top-end 4k 144 Hertz chase and catch gel monitors chroma subsampling does reduce image quality and it's especially noticeable during desktop usage although during games or video playback it should be barely noticeable in most situations however chroma subsampling really isn't a feature that display manufacturers are including out of choice or to save money rather current DisplayPort and HDMI standards simply don't have enough bandwidth for non subsampled 4k 144 Hertz 10 bit content so if you want that frame rate and resolution with HDR it's unfortunately a necessary evil at the moment I expected future monitors with newer DisplayPort standards point need to use chroma subsampling but for now it is what it is and I recommend disabling subsampling and running at a lower refresh rate for desktop content I would only consider using it if you really want to hit the top end of that refresh rate window so to summarize I've made a checklist for HDR monitors I'll be using for future hgr monitor reviews and I think buyers should also look at it to ensure that they're getting a respectable HDR capable display and it can be pretty easy to get fooled by HDR branding on monitors that don't truly deliver a good HDR experience so this checklist will help you sort the crap from the gem so the first thing is that needs to support at least 600 minutes of peak brightness and 300 it's a sustained brightness higher brightness is marginally better and high sustained brightness is not required it needs to support full array local dimming with at least a high double-digit number of zones I don't think Edgewood dimming is good enough and of course this does not apply for all Ed's it needs to support the ability to reproduce 125 percent or more of the sRGB color space eg 90% plus of the DCI p3 color space and of course it needs to support 10 bit processing and at least an 8-bit plus FRC panel true 10 bit not required in addition to this considering hjo is a high-end feature you really want typical performance from a high-end monitor like good pixel response time low input latency which can be an issue with the own steps for HDR processing and good uniformity also as a bonus would be things like a high resolution and refresh rate if you're wondering how many monitors at the moment hit every key criteria in my checklist it's it's not many I think it could be just the latest recent catch our monitors and that's it and those have several other issues I'll talk about in the full review when I get around to doing that hgr is definitely still in an early adopter stage particularly for PC monitors and I really hope people don't go out buying early models thinking they're getting features that actually aren't included that's it for this one a bit of a long one but I hope those that are interested in HD are tech stuck with me the whole way through you'll see my review of the asou speed 27 UQ shortly that's currently being tested so stay tuned for that subscribe for more in depth monitor testing give this video a like if you enjoyed it and I'll catch you in the next one