Last week, we covered a release from IHS that suggested that HDR is mainly a benefit with UltraHD content (HDR Compatible Set Sales Bigger than HDR says IHS Markit). We’re happy to have got feedback from Paul Gray of IHS Markit, a long term analyst of the TV market who clarified that the intention was to say that the features were co-marketed, rather than that the benefits of HDR apply to UltraHD content. He said:
“Streamers are secretive about their variable bitrate coding strategies, but leaving frame rate and dynamic range high would be plausible. This would result in 1080p HDR, in line with the research on consumer perception done by the 4EVER project.
However we do not expect true HDR sets in HD resolutions…regardless of broadcasters’ research results. It’s a triumph of numbers marketing over perception science. We saw similar results in HD. The EBU demonstrated rather conclusively that 720p looked better than 1080i in consumer tests – but the hardware industry wanted bigger numbers!”
Analyst Comment
Paul’s right. Larger and more expensive sets will be the ones that have HDR and they will all be UltraHD, so there will be a big correlation, even if there is not much causality! (BR)
