Hardware BrightSide DR37-P HDR display

Thanks for that priceless nugget of information.

 

I must say, this is an IMPRESSIVE piece of technology. I was beginning to wonder where these HDR screens I've been hearing and hearing about would finally make an appearance, and here they are. Take that, HDTV! You offer nothing that PCs haven't offered for years. Move over for a REAL advancement for televisions!

I must also add my sincere thanks to the author for REMEMBERING to mention, on the very first page, that SM 3.0 is by NO MEANS required for HDR; it's just most game developers opt to only allow for HDR in SM 3.0 mode. Games like the ones mentioned in the article simply skipped from SM 1.3 (usable on Radeon 8500, GeForce 4 Ti) all the way to SM 3.0. (Radeon X1k, GeForce 6/7) There are a number of good demos out there that display HDR rendering on SM 2.0 cards, such as my personal favorite, RTHDRIBL.

Heck, people have listened to nVidia and UbiSofttoo much on this issue, and have forgotten that the first major HDR tech demo used to tout a graphics card was actually made by ATi, and titled "Rendering With Natural Light." It's also a decent demo to look into, though I hear it might not work with some nVidia cards. It apparently at least works on the 7800 series, though.

 

I cannot express how amazing this display is...

But I'll try.

I saw this at SIGGRAPH, and it quite frankly blew me away. I was in the emerging technology presentations when they gave their talk and thought to myself, "hey, this sounds neat." "Neat" doesn't even come close. When I went down to check out the display it was as if someone had figured out how to carve a window out of the side of a house and drag it through space-time to the display booth.

The light coming through the display really felt like I was looking out on a sunny day. The image they had displaying of a glass figure rotating through the light was so realistic I just stood there dumbfounded.

When they say that the difference between HD and HDR is like the diff. between HD and normal displays they're really not doing HDR justice. I look at HD and I think to myself, "wow, what great resolution, look how good that picture is!" I look at this kind of display and thoughts of resolution and picture just vanish, it really looks like you could just reach out and touch whatever's being displayed.

I've never been an early adopter for televisions, still don't have HD, but when these suckers start hitting the shelves of my local Best Buy I'm breaking my piggy bank and buying one!

 

Hi kademing - welcome to bit-tech mate! "I just stood there dumbfounded" is exactly right. Seeing this for the first time is one of those super rare geek moments where you *literally* stand there with your mouth gaping open like a dead fish. And you only realise you're doing it because after two or three minutes, your mouth gets dry and your throat a little sore because you haven't swallowed in all that time!

Except in the first 2 seconds when you're all like -GULP-

If any industry types are reading this, if you will be at CES 2006, we have worked with Brightside to bring a demo unit down to Vegas. Drop me a PM or email me using geoff.richards AT bit-tech.net and I should be able to hook you up for a demo.

- Geoff
Deputy Editor

 

Prices like that are the reasons that thieves exist!

 

They're prototypes and aren't in mass/large scale batch production, meaning that they cost more because the parts are bought based on the number of orders they've got.

 

This has delayed my purchase of an LCD TV still further - I'm still languishing in the land of cruddy 21" CRT, and have no intention to upgrade to something which will be superseded very soon. IMHO unless you can afford to buy an LCD now and upgrade it in 2 years, you are foolish to spend on a TV at this moment in time. Okay, so you can buy a HDTV right now, but it may not support HDCP so you may be stuffed when it comes to watching high def content. Unless you spend megabucks it almost certainly won't support 1080p, and it definitely won't display an HDR picture. Until I can get an HDR, 1080p 36"+ LCD with DVI/HDMI and support for HDCP, I'm sticking where I am!

 

You're gonna be waiting a while for screens like that to be a reasonable price, more than two years without doubt. Of course, if you're loaded or going to be saving up constantly then you're fine!!

I would love a HDR display but I know it aint gonna happen anytime soon so i'm just waiting for the "1080p 36"+ LCD with DVI/HDMI and support for HDCP"

 

HDRI adds another dimension to imaging

Sorry for being longwinded, this stuff is just exciting! I've been incredibly interested in HDRI since I saw Sunnybrook's demo at Siggraph a couple years ago. All of the pictures in this article (though put together expertly to prove the point!) simply can't give HDRI even remote justice. Yes, you can tell there is over-saturation and white out, but the real reason the pictures utterly fail is sheer limitation of LDR methods.

The color data for all of the pictures is only the standard #RRGGBB. This is great for displaying a wide range of color, but poor for providing luminosity. Current technology forces the LCD to provide both color and brightness. The result is a fake sense of brightness by desaturating colors to either lighten or darken pixels. The actual colors of things of course aren't affected by luminosity. When you turn off the lights everything doesn't change to black, just as when the sun shines on a tree it isn't truly washed out to white. Our eyes have rods for luminosity and cones for chromaticity, so it only makes sense to develop images where a display of the color information is provided by the LCD and a display of the brightness information is provided by the LEDs. To further backup the larger LEDs to LCD pixel ratio, our eyes have far more cones than rods. As a result our color vision is highly focused while our ability to determine changes in brightness is significantly less focused, so many LCDs and few LEDs mimic our eyes quite well.

Back to how the demo looked, when you look at an HDR screen, you are presented with virtually the same light output that a real life scene would provide. An example from their Siggraph demo was a still image of a beach. The picture had full sunshine as well as several areas of rather deep shade. What was amazing was the pure color the monitor could produce. The bright areas where the sun shines on the beach produced intensely saturated colors so bright that they believably and consciously fool you into thinking that scene could be real. Meanwhile the deep shadows also had incredibly full, rich color. The reason is the LCD does not have to provide a fake change in brightness, fooling you into thinking the picture is brighter because the colors are lighter. The LCD provides the fully saturated medium tones allowing the LEDs to blast all the needed light through the display.

BrightSide’s product is more than just a standard LCD with LEDs behind it. It’s the realization of the HDRI method in hardware form. It takes the new imaging format and creates a new display that ingeniously reuses existing technology to adequately display HDR images. Once they fix the cooling on the LEDs the cost to produce these things will drop significantly. $49,000 is simply because they are practically custom built, and they don’t have the capacity to fill any sort of mass demand.

Debevec’s research into HDRI and BrightSide’s development of an HDRI display was incredible, but there were some other amazing inventions at Siggraph 2005 that if mixed with HDRI would be absolutely ridiculous. Another technology was a wide-gamut projection system called Irodori (http://www-akasaka.nict.go.jp/SIGG2005E3.html). By using 6 primaries instead of just 3 (RGB), they are able to produce virtually the entire human eye visual color gamut. NTSC standards don’t even come close to this, and it was incredible how rich and deep the colors their projectors could create. If we mix HD-HDR displays with the full visual color gamut, and heck throw stereoscopic video in for kicks, we’ve got some really incredible things that will start appearing soon that probably will finally fool the eye between what is real and what is not.

 

What's Current Status of Brightside Technolgy?

The original article is going on a year old. Are there any new developments regarding production, alliances, and prices? I just discovered this article and am having second thoughts about buying a 40" LCD. I have a friend leading me toward the Sony Bravia series, but my research indicates they are not true HD (only 720p native). What other LCD HDTV's are out there that are true 1080p HD and are respectable regarding reliability and quality of picture and sound? (Of course it seems nothing can match the Brightside.) I must admit the Sony 40" Bravia XBR had the best picture when compared side by side with the other LCD brands at Best Buy.

 

Nah mate, you're reading the dates all 'American' - it's 3/10 meaning 3 October, not 3/10 meaning March 10. It was only published in October 2005!

720p is true HD. It is one of the HD standards, along with 1080i and 1080p. Most HD broadcasts are either 1080i or 720p because the bandwidth requirement for 1080p is monstrous. Nevertheless, I know what you mean. I am holding off on buying an LCD until I can get a 1080p TV.

I *will* own a HDR LCD TV at some point. Will probably be waiting a while though

 

This would be why all our articles use full "wordy" dates: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/10/04/brightside_hdr_edr/1.html

"Published: 4th October 2005" - to avoid confusion.

To address weevil's concerns, Brightside's HDR technology is pretty much independent of the LCD resolution. Meaning it would be down to a licensed manufacturer (eg Samsung, Sony, LG etc) to decide if they wanted to do 720p, 1080p or anything else.

Whether you wait for HDR HDTV screens depends a bit on what display you currently have, and how often you care to spend thousands on a new screen. HDR may not be widely available for even vaguely sensible money until 2007 or even 2008, so you could wait, or buy now and then buy again

Widespread LDR 1080p is coming but will require the usual addition of hardware that goes with it eg HTPC with enough grunt to power 1080p etc So, you can either have 720p now, wait a while for 1080p or wait even longer for HDR 1080p. At any point in that cycle, you can buy in just as long as you realise that within a year or two, there will be "the next big thing".

 

Much like with PCs then. It is the curse of the tech-head - no sooner have you splashed out hundreds (or thousands) on the latest uberwidget than some company comes out with something bigger, better, faster, shinier and generally more desirable for less money than you paid for your "old hat" technology last month.

 

Thanks. Here is an update direct from Brightside.

Thanks mclean. Below is an update I got directly from Brightside via e-mail correspondence. Our wait for an affordable consumer level unit may not be more than a couple years (I hope). And yes, you pegged me, I am American (north)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Thanks for your kind comments about our display. As you read, the DR37-P
really isn't suited for the consumer market but I understand your desire to
get one.
We are working with a major Asian display maker to develop the next
generation of our very high contrast HDR display but we will only be
providing them with engineering prototypes by the middle of 2006. I would
suspect they won't make it a product until late in 2006.

Of course, we can't even guarantee that they will productize it as that
decision is completely up to them.

I suggest you look at LCD TVs from Sharp or Samsung for now as they provide
pretty good quality at a reasonable price. Hopefully you will be able to buy
a Brightside based system from one of these manufacturers next year."

Regards

Gary Yurkovich
VP Sales and Corporate Development
BrightSide Technologies Inc.

 

Next year for HDR displays would be awesome, if that rep is accurate in his/her estimates. While I take the comparison to LD/HD and HD/HDR with a grain of salt (as HD is utterly unimpressive to me), I can tell that this concept is what's going to make all of the HDTV early-adopters go

I know the TV networks are going to love sending out HDR signal at 1080p. That's what... 1920x1080x48x60 bits/sec? That can't be right... I'm getting over 711MiB/s.

 

Wrong way around mate.

"The rods are more numerous, some 120 million, and are more sensitive than the cones. However, they are not sensitive to color. The 6 to 7 million cones provide the eye's color sensitivity and they are much more concentrated in the central yellow spot known as the macula. In the center of that region is the " fovea centralis ", a 0.3 mm diameter rod-free area with very thin, densely packed cones."

Our cones are also less sensitive than our rods.

 

Don't forget, films are 24fps and video is 30fps, so you can at least halve your estimate.

Also, I'm not sure that there is going to be 48 bits/pixel. I'm imagine that there will have to be some colour sampling to reduce this to a more resonable figure, however 2 minutes of googling found nothing concrete on this!

This gives us about 7.4MB/s * (whatever bits/pixel you want to guess at!)

 

Which is why it's hard to distinguish colours in dim light, even when you can make out shapes quite easily based on their brightness.

Yeah but that's not factoring in any compression. By your maths, a 2 hour DVD (720 x 480 resolution) would require 720 x 480 x 24 x 30 x 7200 bits = about 208 GB!!

 

Prior art

 

The first thing I noticed....

I love Brightside's idea, and even with the losses associated with recording and playback in the videos, that thing is amazing. Everybody's got their ideas about what "the next big display type" will be -- but I don't see OLED's, or SED's, being rated with such high ranges in contrast and real world brightness values. Perhaps SED will have a cost advantage when it hits the market, but it definitely won't have a picture advantage. Unless somebody knows more about OLED's and such than I have heard, I think LCD with dynamic LED backlight like Brightside is definitely the monitor of the future for the next many years. I was actually a little sad when I heard Brightside's demo monitor was broken during transport to one of the recent trade shows....

One thing I'd like to point out: In spite of the crystal clear picture, the first thing I noticed in the videos/pics in this article was the LACK OF A POWER LED on the Brightside monitor. The existence of Power LED's on everything has annoyed me for years...my TV, my computer monitor, my computer speakers, even my optical mouse (I've got a Microsoft Intellimouse with a tail-light that's on 24-7). I could cover all of these with electrical tape...but why are they there in the first place -- especially on TV's and Monitors? I can tell the thing is on based on the picture, and nothing ruins a nice dark scene in a dark room more than a blazing green light just below the picture. Perhaps the power LED could be useful during that 0.01% of the time when your TV is on, but isn't yet getting a signal from some external device so the picture is just black...but how about at least making the power LED easily defeatable (IE: hidden behind a little bezel/door like the aux inputs on most new TV's?).

I really hope that in addition to seeing how amazing Brightside's monitor is and being quick on the uptake of their technology, the TV manufacturers will also take a que and re-think the tradition of power LED's.