The first time I saw a baseball game on a high-definition TV it blew my mind. Everything looked so … crisp. Heck, I could make out individual blades of grass on the field. I didn’t want to watch anything that wasn’t HD after that.
Now a new TV format called HDR (high-dynamic range) is here and it’s going to make you feel the like the ballgame is being played in your home.
But before you go and chuck your old TV for a new HDR model, let me explain some of the biggest questions you’ll likely have about the technology.
What is HDR?
HDR is a term used to describe a television with a screen that can get far brighter than your normal HDTV. Making the display brighter gives it a greater contrast ratio between the brightest spots and the darkest black spots.
HDR TVs also have a wider color gamut, which means they can display more colors than non-HDR TVs.
Combining a larger contrast ratio with a wider color gamut means on-screen images look more vibrant and life-like than they do on current TVs.
Is this another one of those ridiculous 3D, curved-screen marketing schemes to get me to buy a new TV?
Well, sure TV makers want you to buy HDR TVs, but HDR isn’t some ploy. It actually makes what you’re watching look better. Curved and 3D screens didn’t actually improve image quality. Getting a curved TV that could display 3D movies was mostly a novelty — an expensive novelty, but a novelty nonetheless.
Newer 4K TVs, which offer four times the resolution of standard 1080p HDTVs, help improve image quality, but only if they are large enough (about 50 inches or larger) and you sit a certain distance from them.
See, pixels produce the image you see on your TV, and the more pixels you have, the sharper and clearer your picture will be. But when you’re talking about thousands of pixels, you start to hit a point of diminishing returns in terms of clarity, which is why when you look at a 4K TV vs. a 1080p TV, you’re not going to be as impressed with the image quality as you were when you first saw a 1080p TV years ago.
So how is an HDR picture better?
HDR allows your screen to display a greater number of colors at a brightness level you’ve never seen on a home TV.
Because HDR can display more colors, you’ll see better color gradients and blending. A lot of people say the images tend to pop more, which means they don’t look as flat as they do on standard TVs.
Cool, how does it work?
Think of it like this: When a studio shoots a TV show or movie, the content they end up capturing has a TON of data. Before Ultra HD Blu-ray and streaming services like Netflix, getting that data to your TV was all but impossible, as there was no way for so much data to travel to your screen.