Hardware BrightSide DR37-P HDR display

I want to congratulate you guys. It's really encouraging to see that you have clearly read the full article, thought about it, and had intelligent questions to ask. As has been shown elsewhere, it's far to easy to skim read it and make pointless, misleading, sarcastic comments. But then, I always knew you lot were special

Let me try and answer as many questions as I can, in reverse order:


automagsrock: http://www.little-gamers.com/hamham_downloads.php

Migishu: any problems had in reading anything are indeed down to the fact that a standard LDR camera (video or still) cannot even pretend to handle the amount of luminance, and so just whites out in desperation.

It does take a little getting used to, but worth remembering is that this is LDR content on an HDR screen, so it's having to interpolate brightness. Once we start seeing native HDR content, the artists will exercise more control I'm sure.

the crownles: I don't know what plans BrightSide have for going public, but I know there are several private investors involved already. I'm sure they'd be interested to hear from you if you were serious about investing.

Firehed: as mentioned, they are planning to do licensing deals with as many major manufacturers as show an interest. Considering this technology is streets ahead of everything else, while allowing the manufacturers to use their existing LCD plants to pump out screens, it's hard to imagine anybody passing up the opportunity.

The 48-bit colour stuff is a little vague for now, because certain graphics card makers have certain stuff still under NDA for a little longer, but you will see more info soon enough. But yes - it not only increases the dynamic range black / white, but gives a truckload of additional shades in between.

Developers were reluctant to comment, again, because certain things are still under NDA, but my understanding is that for stuff like what we've seen in Lost Coast, one wouldn't need to simulate bloom in software - you would just make the sun really bright, and let the display / our eyes do the rest. Since these displays are maybe a year or more away from being available at vaguely sensible prices, we've got time to figure that one out.

 

I'm curious about something which I'm not sure has been answered in the article / forum posts.

Let's take a look at the demonstration with the HDTV and the BrightSide display side by side, with the white rectangle.

The BrightSide display shows the brilliant white rectangle, along with a big, noticable bloom effect.

From what I understand, this bloom is by design, it is how the technology works.

If so, I can't see this technology doing too well for computer artists. Imagine a composition where they need a bright white image surrounded by darkness, just like in the white rectangle example. The bloom effect will cause a problem here because it will be 'bleeding' HDR bloom into the dark area. What if you do actually want something very bright surrounding perfectly by darkness?

 

Welcome to the forums andy.

Bear in mind that the bloom technically isn't there. The camera creates it, and to a certain extend, the human eye does too, but the white rectangles are identical. The solution to your question is to simply dial down the brightness in the rectangle. Just because the display can do 4000 cd/m2 doesn't mean you have to use it. You have 8-bits of brightness data per pixel, so just throttle it back to maybe 1000 cd/m2 and you'll still be twice as bright as the regular HDTV, as well as having killer 0 cd/m2 blacks vs "grey".

That isn't possible - when you have areas of such a huge contrast bordering each other, the human eye does the rest. However, for example, the BrightSide logo test - that doesn't suffer from the bloom when you see it first hand:



I know the camera messes it up here, but trust me - when you see it up close, it's just the clearest, sharpest image you've ever seen. No bloom, just pin sharp. As I said in the article, if you didn't know you were looking at an LCD display, you'd swear it was a painted shop sign with a bright neon backlight. Like a very well-made transparency on a lightbox or something...

 

Would I be right in thinking that this technology wouldn't have been possible with CCFLs because you can't change their brightness quick enough? Obviously it wouldn't be as good anyway but it strikes me as an obvious step if it were possible? And now brightside got exclusive rights to the dynamic lighting technology in any form - ouch! The innovations team at Toshiba, Sharp, Samsung, etc, must be absolutely kicking themselves.

It'll be fascinating to see how usable it is as a computer display for desktop work etc.

 

It did cross my mind when I was in Vancouver - you wouldn't be able to control the backlight in different areas of the screen, but the image quality isn't SO bad when the backlight is uniformly high / low depending on the screen.

However, BrightSide have the patent on the dynamic adjustment, so at the very least, a royalty would likely be due.

You raise an interesting point about the response time of a CCFL - I very much doubt it comes anywhere near that of the LEDs used. Plus, even if it could, you would still be stuck with a peak brightness of only 500 cd/m2, which ain't all that bright. You could never extract 4000 cd/m2 from a CCFL.

For those who think this patent / licensing thing is a big deal, just remember that similar deals have existed for years: think Dolby; think Philips - the inventor of the CD... any major innovation is the byproduct of some major R&D investment, and that investment is protected by patents, and slowly repaid through royalties.

There's nothing evil about it - everyone I met at BrightSide was very friendly and approachable, so while the major players might well be disappointed they aren't the rights holders, neither have their had to spend time / money developing & perfecting the technology. All they have to do is agree licensing terms and off they go really - all the hard work done for them

Since royalties are normally a percent, or flat-fee per unit sold, the fact that this IMLED technology is going to help them sell a boat load of displays, sharing a few dollars per unit isn't going to bother them I'm sure.

 

Intriguing

I definitely like what I see, and I'm sure filmmakers/special effects artists will also appreciate the accuracy of these displays.

The article mention LDR on conventional DVDs.

Is the data on current DVDs consider LDR just because of the resolution or just because of the color data that is encoded? If it has nothing to do with resolution and just the color data encoded on the disc, do the HD-DVD/Blu-ray formats (MPEG-4, H.264, or VC-1 codecs) allow for the encoding of HDR data?

It seems a waste for companies to already be preparing these next-generation optical formats that won't take full advantage of these new displays.

 

Thank you for your continuing responce The Pope, I eagerly await this sexy new technology

 

I think it would be safe to assume (and correct me if i'm wrong) that its not only the encoding but also the fact that the color information isnt there to begin with. This is due to cameras only being able to capture video/images in LDR.

As for the encoding of HD-DVD/blu-ray.. great question. I'd like to hear that one myself. If the encoding doesnt support a HDR color range that could be interesting. Of course, somethign like that could always be updated in the future using a firmware update. But to do that, there would need to be some sort of connection on the DVD player to uplink it to a network and what not. Possible, but unsure how the next gen dvdplayers will be equipped.

 

It's not the players you have to worry about so much as the formats themselves - if HD-DVD and Blu-Ray don't specify a standard for encoding HDR picture information, then we won't get any, and it will be interpolation all the way until the next-next-gen of disc formats comes along. Of course if either Sony or Toshiba can pull off true HDR content, that could be a serious boon in the high-def DVD format war!

I suspect the first true HDR sources will be the next gen of GPUs from NVidia and ATi, so those of us with pockets full of gold can look forward to playing future games on our GeForce 8800 GTX / ATi 2800(?) in true HDR. I for one can't wait to have my socks well and truly blasted off.

Two further concerns:
(1) Will the DVI standard cope with HDR output from GFX cards? If not, are we going to need a whole new connection standard?
(2) How is this going to impact on game engines? If the hardware creates a 'true' bloom effect around bright objects, for example, surely the engine needs to know that an HDR display is connected and turn off the artificial bloom it produces for LDR displays? bigz?

 

Article and followup

Very good article, one the most comprehensive and well thoughtout explanations of our technology i've come across.


The display looks even better compared to the normal LCD's in light.

Todays gfx cards do everything in floating point 16 bit or more, this gives us the ability to do stuff in HDR.

3dlabs and other manufacturers have products available to send more than 8 bits to a display using dual link dvi. Single link is only 8 bits.

HD-DVD's are just higher resolution and bitrate encoded movies. There is no codec available to play higher bitdepth movies, for now anyways

 

Let me be the one to welcome you to the forums - it's an honour that you dropped by. As you'll see from the reams of positive comments above, we're all pretty fired up about this new display technology! I for one will be following your progress with interest. Thanks for the clarification on DVI and HDR codecs. Shame there are no codecs yet - is that something you're working on as well? Do you think we'll ever see such codecs in Blu-ray or HD-DVD?

 

need a replacement for dvi anyway tbh, its pretty crap
the fact that for uber high res screens you need to use 2 dvi ports linked together is just retarded

 

"Shame there are no codecs yet - is that something you're working on as well? Do you think we'll ever see such codecs in Blu-ray or HD-DVD?"


http://www.brightsidetech.com/products/process.php

check it out...

there is also hd-sdi on the nvidia 4000fx card which is 12 bit 4:4:4 i believe
dvi-d dual link has 6 extra pins over single link, and it is 16 bit so it does the job for now anyways.

 

Outstanding article.

My question relates to how small can the technology be made? I have an InFocus projector set up in my home theater, which relies upon a fairly small DLP and a uber-bright light to project the image onto the wall. Will/Can this new technique be made small enough to allow me to create a larger than 37" image? If not, does this put us (the consumer) back about 20 years when the first three gun projection TV behemoths we being made and we needed a very large room to hold the box.

The article references technological difficulties of making a display smaller than 18". I will assume that, for now, this is a function of miniturization of the backlight mechanisms. When this gets in the hands of the big guys (Sony, Tosh, Phillips, etc.) can we expect to have large scale nano LEDs to power this beast? If not, and larger is the preferred way to go, then I would expect to see this type of display in wide spread use at sports arenas and stadiums. Perhaps with a few sporting clubs footing the bill, the cost will nosedive faster than a $20 call girl.

Brightside, please go public now, please, pretty please...

 

That's cool that Brightside has thought ahead to develop JPEG-HDR and MPEG-HDR codecs. I'm assuming these codecs are proprietary. Are these extensions backward compatible with existing JPEG and MPEG (in case a media playback device manufacturer decided not to license Brightside codecs)?

 

"My question relates to how small can the technology be made? I have an InFocus projector set up in my home theater"

The first ever prototype was a projector system, it did not offer the same contrast as the 18 or 37 inch lcd's but still was pretty good.

The technology could be applied to camera's, just have a look at the website. Its certainly scalable, just takes time to redesign.

"Are these extensions backward compatible with existing JPEG and MPEG (in case a media playback device manufacturer decided not to license Brightside codecs)?"

Yes, just as the display supports viewing 'LDR' data, the codecs are backwards compatible with existing jpeg and mpeg formats respectively.

 

sorry to lower the intellectual tone here, but...

im gonna sell a kidney for one of those bad boys!

 

Another excellent article, well done bit-tech.

I'm finally impressed by a new display technology. All the other stuff in between 50Hz CRT and this never really impressed me that much. Even HDTV shared too much in common with older technologies for me but this really is a huge step in the right direction.

 

I'm glad the BrightSide boys have dropped in to tackle the super-techie questions - I was beginning to run out of answers

 

Moto from The Tech Zone was also there at the demo in Vancouver (he's a local) and managed a really good macro shot of the BrightSide logo:

http://www.thetechzone.com/?m=show&id=384&page=4

This kinda shows what I've been trying to explain: no bloom, just black blacks and pin-sharp contrast.