One of the big influences on the TV market is the soccer world cup with estimates that 3.4 billion viewers (according to GlobalWebIndex) and the world cup can also be a challenge for programme makers (in Brazil, many of the matches had both very bright and very dark pitch areas because of the timing).
Jeff Yurek of Nanosys had a look at the accuracy of the reproduction of the colours worn by team at the event in Russia.
Originally, 32 teams reached the finals in Russia, but Yurek looked at just the top ten ranked teams (according to a CBS ranking). As getting hold of kit was potentially a challenge, he used the colours of the flats and compared them to the colours of the current Rec. 709 TV colour space, used for all current TV transmissions and also to the Rec. 2020 gamut that is the target for Super-hivision. Yurek had difficulty getting complete information on kit colours, so used the colour of flags (not including grey, black and white). He took the two most dominant colours in the flag. The chart plotted against CIE 1931 is shown below.
Color gamut of the 2018 World Cup’s top 10 countries.The result was that only two countries had both key colours within the Rec. 709 gamut. All the others had colours outside the Rec. 709 gamut, but within the Rec. 2020 future colour range.
Once the finalists were decided, Yurek took the next step and managed to acquire actual shirts for the finalists, France and Croatia (although his Croatian shirt took some time to buy as they were sold out!). The results show that the finalists both used colours that fell just inside Rec. 709. He also compared the colour of the jerseys with the flag colours and found them close, validating the use of the flag colours as a proxy.
France vs Croatia jerseys in a 2018 World Cup-themed chromaticity shootout
Of course, shirts are not the only colours and Yurek has speculated that many of the jerseys worn by goalkeepers, which are very bright, would have fallen outside Rec. 709. For example, the French keeper, Hugo Lorris had a ‘super saturated yellow-green’. (the use of very bright colours is believed by some to reduce the chance of a forward hitting an area of the goal away from the keeper as attention tends to be drawn towards bright colours and there is a tendency to kick towards where the eyes are looking)
Boots are also brightly coloured, these days, and in a separate post posted in 2014, Yurek looked at the bright blue boots worn by star striker (although not so much at this world cup), Lionel Messi. Yurek bought a pair of the boots (honest, boss, it was a real business expense!) and found when he measured them that the colour sits outside Rec. 709.
The horseshoe shaped chart above represents the range of colors that our eyes can see and the triangle contains all the colors an HDTV can show. Lionel Messi’s blue cleats fall well outside that range so the color you see on your TV is not accurate.
Soccer is, of course, one of the key global drivers of the Pay TV market and improving performance in broadcasting the sport is very helpful. I remember clearly when my wife (who is a soccer fan) was watching a match one day when she said “Wait, is this in standard definition?” – after a long period when she said that she couldn’t really tell the difference between SD and HD. Finally!
Anyway, soccer is also challenging in areas other than colour. Many of the matches in the Brazil world cup in 2014 took place with difficult lighting for conventional SDR that looks much better in HDR.
In this kind of situation, HDR gives a much better image. Image:Courtesy Sky
In the demonstrations by the BBC, EBU and LG in the past of high frame rate (HFR) displays, soccer was one of the key viewing applications – the motion of the ball is much clearer on a 100Hz OLED than in a lower frame rate display. (BR)
This article was synthesized from a number of blog posts created for the dot color blog and is re-used with grateful permission. Jeff Yurek id Director of Marketing and Investor Relations at Nanosys, which makes quantum dots.
