Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater New TV - 4K or go 1080

I don't think Oled large screen TVs will ever be price competitive. They will get better and cheaper, I'm sure, but so will LED sets. The pattern so far has been that while Oleds got slightly cheaper, LEDs got better. Resolution got better; colors got better; contrast got better; brightness got better.

Extrapolating, while Oleds get better, LEDs will get better faster, in price/performance.

The next big development in video is going to be HDR. As usual, LED is ahead of Oled. HDR-ready LED sets have been available for months (I have one), but so far as I know, Oled HDR is now just a promise from LG. There are no HDR Oled sets available for sale or in the hands of reviewers, for us to read about. Maybe we'll see HDR Oled this Fall, and maybe we won't. It is not obvious that HDR will be practical for Oled sets because of the burn-in issue -- when used at high brightness levels, Oled pixels age faster.

So you are going on about HDR, but I am quite sure that if you put an LED even with HDR right beside an OLED will it look as good? Are you telling me that HDR will make Plasma look bland?

If you look into the LED technology, the limiting factor is how black is black and how white is white. Then you have a number of steps between those two. So an 8bit TV will give you 256 gradient steps and a newer 10bit TV will give you 1024 steps. So you can get effectively more colour and a better colour reproduction. But if your blacks are never black then the only choice you have to get more dynamic range is to make the whites more brighter. But brighter does not mean whiter. And you can get to a point of over saturation where you loose detail.

I don't have an Oled set. I have had several plasma sets, and my HDR-ready LED does indeed make plasma look bland.


I can't quite follow this. Brighter does in fact mean whiter, since white in ordinary TVs is from adding the RGB primaries (with sometimes a fourth primary), so when each primary gets brighter, so does white.

You lose white detail when color depth is not sufficient (not because of saturated colors).

I do digital photography and you do get loss of detail with over saturation of colour. Think of it as when you have many bright pixles of almost the same colour side by side, the brightness bleeds into one another to the point that you cannot distinguish the subtle differences in the colour. As you make the pixles brighter, then the realism of that colour looses effect. For example if the only way to get a true red is to brighen the pixles, then a red apple would appear to glow rather than just be red. The apple would have less detail and look over saturated to get the correct colour.

I have an iMac. It has a black boarder around the outside.. but if I try and put a black graphic on the screen, the black is not as back as the outside boarder as LED cannot get a true black. Now I can get most whites, but in doing so, it over emphasizes that colour and detracts from the colours around it.

Our eyes are less sensitive to differences between very bright colors. But that's brightness, not saturation. I'm unaware of an effect that makes more saturated colors more difficult to discriminate. I thought it worked the opposite way -- more saturated colors are easier to discriminate.

here is an example



a photo of an apple



the same apple with the colour intensity boosted. it is brighter, and the red is saturated to the point that you have lost detail, but you have got a more intense looking red. The apple doesn't look realistic but very red.

I'm not sure that what you call color intensity here is the same as saturation (see note). But anyhow, the effect you are illustrating is called "banding" in describing video, and is the result of increasing a range without also increasing the number of levels reproduced. But HDR video does increase the number of levels, from the 8 bit color depth of present standard video to at least 10 bits. The number of available color gradations is multiplied by 64 or more for HDR.

For video that is not native HDR but is rather upconverted from standard 8 bit video, today's HDR-ready TVs have to rely on a good upconversion processor to smooth out bands of the sort you illustrated with your apples.

Note on saturation. The greater colorfulness of HDR-WCG displays can't really be illustrated using video monitors of the sort I have and, I suppose, the sort you have. Wide Color Gamut displays show saturations of color that standard monitors cannot reproduce. There is not just more intense color, but there are new colors.

My parents ended up getting a UHD TV. They knew it was early to be adopting, but the local dealer they like just happened to get some of last year's model in at a steal. The only reason they were looking is because their bedroom TV's tuner stopped working.

This is the model they ended up with:

Samsung 4K UHD HU9000 Series Curved Smart TV - 55” Class

You can see the original retail price was $4999.99, which of course never really counts, and Samsung's website has it marked down to $3199.99. The dealer was able to offer it for $1499. While I did see a 70" UHD TV at Costco for $1700, I doubt the picture quality was in the same league.

They went ahead and upgraded their Netflix to the plan with 4K, and they're on my Amazon.com Prime as well, so I'll have to check out some content when I can. I watched just a little of Chef's Table on Netflix, and it did look pretty good. The motion wasn't as smooth as you'd hope (which I attribute to streaming at that resolution), but the clarity was there. I'm sure UHD Blu-ray will be an even better experience.

I just thought I'd add this note to an existing thread rather than starting a new one. I'll have to have them try out the 3D on it, too.