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ITU announces new standard for High Dynamic Range TV
HDR-TV will add texture and colour to enhance realism
Geneva, 5 July 2016 – ITU has announced a new standard for
High Dynamic Range Television that represents a major advance in television
broadcasting. High Dynamic Range Television (HDR-TV) brings an incredible
feeling of realism, building further on the superior colour fidelity of ITU’s
Ultra-High Definition Television (UHDTV) Recommendation BT.2020. ITU’s
Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) has developed the standard – or Recommendation
– in collaboration with experts from the television industry, broadcasting
organizations and regulatory institutions in its Study Group 6.
“High Dynamic Range Television will bring a whole new viewing experience to
audiences around the world,” said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao, welcoming
the announcement. “TV programming will be enhanced with brighter pictures that
add sparkle to entertainment and realism to news coverage.”
“High Dynamic Range Television represents an important step towards the
virtual-reality quality of experience to be delivered by future broadcasting and
multimedia systems,” said François Rancy, Director of the ITU Radiocommunication
Bureau. He congratulated Yukihiro Nishida, Chairman of ITU-R Study Group 6, for
this major achievement.
The ITU-R UHDTV
Recommendation BT.2020, approved in October 2015, represented the
continuous evolution of television since it was invented in the 1930s,
transforming the dim black and white screen into an ultra-high definition colour
picture on large flat panel displays.
This latest ITU-R
HDR-TV Recommendation BT.2100 brings a further boost to television
images, giving viewers an enhanced visual experience with added realism. The
HDR-TV Recommendation allows TV programmes to take full advantage of the new and
much brighter display technologies. HDR-TV can make outdoor sunlit scenes appear
brighter and more natural, adding highlights and sparkle. It enhances dimly lit
interior and night scenes, revealing more detail in darker areas, giving TV
producers the ability to reveal texture and subtle colours that are usually lost
with existing Standard Dynamic Range TV.
The HDR-TV Recommendation details two options for producing High Dynamic
Range TV images. The Perceptual Quantization (PQ) specification achieves a very
wide range of brightness levels using a transfer function that is finely tuned
to match the human visual system and the Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) specification
which offers a degree of compatibility with legacy displays by more closely
matching the previously established television transfer curves. The
Recommendation also outlines a simple conversion process between the two HDR-TV
options.
The ITU-R Recommendation BT.2100 also allows TV producers to choose from
three levels of detail or resolution: HDTV (1920 by 1080), and UHDTV ‘4K’ (3840
by 2160) and ‘8K’ (7680 by 4320) – all of which use the progressive imaging
system with extended colour gamut and range of frame-rates in ITU’s UHDTV
Recommendation BT.2020.
“This Recommendation is the culmination of three years of intensive work by
dedicated image experts from around the world. HDR images are stunning and this
is another major step forward in television quality,” said Andy Quested,
Chairman of ITU-R Working Party 6C (WP 6C), which developed the new standard.
“Programme makers today need a much wider range of options in order to meet the
expectations of the different platforms they must supply, and this need for
flexibility is catered for within the framework of a stable ITU-R
Recommendation.”
For more information, please contact:
Paul Conneally
Head, Corporate Communications Division, ITU
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Grace Petrin
Communication Officer, ITU Radiocommunication Bureau
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