High Dynamic Range Monitors 131
An anonymous reader writes, "We are seeing more and more about high dynamic range (HDR) images, where the photographer brackets the exposures and then combines the images to increase the dynamic range of the photo. The next step is going to be monitors that can display the wider dynamic range these images offer, as well as being more true-to-life, as they come closer to matching the capabilities of the ol' Mark I eyeball. The guys who seem to be furthest along with this are a company called Brightside Technologies. Here is a detailed review of the Brightside tech." With a price tag of $49K for a 37" monitor (with a contrast ratio of 200K to 1), HDR isn't exactly ready for the living room yet.
Medical Imaging (Score:5, Insightful)
I beg to differ. (Score:5, Informative)
A good, excellent radiologist could detect subtle differences of about 80% that of a standard person. I'd give you the exact quote but it's been a while since I remembered the data- suffice to say I was impressed at the level (in controlled lighting situations) that they were able to see in film.
A good medical display is a peeled LCD- all the colors have been chemically removed from the surface- and has typically a brighter backlight and another polarizer to knock down the lmin even further. This gives you better dynamic range that is easily adjusted faster than film can- want to zoom in? No problem- touch and zoom- or if you had film, grab a loupe (or crane your head closer). Digital wins hands down.
Yes, if you digitize a negative you have a data density that can't be reached very easily (I used to estimate this for a job for large quantities of imagery and at high quality ratios- 2 micron spot sizes). But frankly alot of that information is useless- you don't need to know what isn't of relevance.
The most important aspect of digital imaging is proper viewing environment- something no one seems to get. Reduce the lighting of the area to 0.5 fc and remove any sources of glare off the monitor. Wear dark clothing. Have wall wash lighting appropriate to about 3-9 fc. Have surfaces neutral gray. Ceiling black.
Digital definately competes with film in many markets for medical xray- Mammography was just the easiest to choose because it has been such a radical change in such a short time period.
I should note I used to work for Eastman Kodak and did work with other individuals on these digital products (specifically, algorithms)... but I'm not biased because of that. Just the simple truth- from the raw data I've seen I'll feel happy and safe knowing my wife gets a digital mammagram every year.
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I had an interesting conversation with my dentist about the new digital xray equipment.
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Re:I beg to differ. (Score:4, Informative)
I am not arguing against digital radiology, rather I am all for it because of the inherent benefits (less rads, less time, less film processing variability, more convenient, etc....etc....etc...), but the reality is that digital radiology is still not all it could be. You said it yourself in that a well trained radiologist can detect about 80% of the differences present in digital representation. Well..... 20% is still a lot of potential misses on diagnoses.
The reasons that digital has been so successful is not necessarily because of its inherent superiority in image quality. Rather it has been successful because it is cheaper and more convenient especially given the trend away from traditional medical records management.
As to the density of information, I routinely take film images of electron microscopy captures and digitize them because of the convenience, and that is working on the nanoscale range. I am throwing information away by the conversion, but it is more convenient for all of the reasons we have already talked about.
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How many silver halide molecules can you fit into any given area?
Now, how many pixels can you fit into that same area?
Exactly.
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Prosumer-level equipment already is comparable to 35mm film, and will probably exceed it
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There are areas where film has a slight edge (HDR black and white) but that's also being challenged.
For the record I also have experience with developing film manually. Considering the time and work (and cancer from the nasty chemicals) that you avoid with a digital work flow there are just not many benefits from film anymore.
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Mammography: the surface, No problem- touch, hands, proper viewing environment,
You are indeed taunting the teenage
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For CT and MRI, however, the best thing about using a computer to read it rather than reading it on printed films, is that you can actually adjust the window (from the bone window to the soft-tissue window etc
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Nonsense. You can't compare a recording device (film) with a playback device (monitor). Digital sensors (the equivalent of film) can have just as great dynamic range as film and are inherently more linear. Monitors have greater dynamic range than print output. slide film is better than print.
There are already specialized displays for medical imaging.
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Hello? Say what?
Just for your edification though, it is generally accepted that given current technology, the difference in dynamic range is still about 1.5 to 3 stops better with film than digital. Clicky clicky [anandtech.com] for just one reference out of many.
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Print has a maximum dynamic range of about 5.5 to 6 stops unless it uses a special process. Film itself can go up to about 11 stops although typical films offer less than 10. Furthermore, film is not linear and the resultant output is typically compressed to 8.5 or less. Dmax for slide film can be as great as 3.6
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One of the great things about digital is seeing the imm
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One huge advantage of digital imaging is that it's quite easy to adjust the window and level (analogous to brightness and contrast) of any image to look at deep shadows and brig
Who's not ready? (Score:2)
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The eye has a very effective contrast control mechanism (the pupil), but it works in time, as the eye scan the space. So, our dynamic range at an instant T is small, but as this range is adjusted to the subject we observe, the resulting image we record is using a much higher range.
The idea of the GP, that is currently under study by the camera manufacturers, is to allow the camera to do that range adjustment as it scans
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According to one of the links, the human eye has an overall luminance vision range of 14 orders of magnitude from starlight to direct sun. You're correct that we can't see all that at once because of the way our eyes adapt to changing conditions, but the article also stated that the eye's instantaneous luminance vision range is five orders of magnitude. So in the same scene we can make out details with a contrast range of 100,000:1. That's why the blacks often look gray on a typical monitor with a contrast
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Laser displays (Score:2)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10
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It's tres cool (Score:4, Interesting)
The examples they usually use are things like light streaming through stained glass in a church, where normally you'd either only see the stained glass properly exposed, or the rest of the room, but not both. It does work to very good effect in those instances, and heightens the "window into the world" effect that high resolution displays have. If this were to be combined with 2X HD resolution 60P motion video (about 4,000 pixels across) it would kick serious ass as the next 'Imax' lifelike motion picture display.
Oddly enough, the captcha for the post reply screen right now is 'aperture'.
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For manually-captured bracketed images, there's AHDRIC [uh.edu] (disclaimer: I wrote this). As long as the EXIF info is intact and the only thing that changes between shots is the shutterspeed, this should do the trick. A related tool (AHDRIA) lets you capture HDRs automatically by controlling a digicam via USB (Canon digicams only, sorry). This process can take 20-120 seconds, depending on the
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It could also breath new life into older motion pictures. A lot of movies shot during the 20th century look quite feeble on home video with today's display tech, but would look inredible if scanned and stored in a format that preserved the full dynamic range of the image. There is a tremendous amount of HDR info locked in Hollywood's va
HDR rules (Score:1, Interesting)
Monitors? .. What about input? (Score:5, Interesting)
i.e.
"It's a feature in Photoshop CS2 or Photomatix or FDRTools."
Even black and white can be support HDR. This is a great B&W example [flickr.com] of why 8-bit greyscale just doesn't cut it.
--
"The difference between Religion and Philosophy, is that one is put into practise"
Re:Monitors? .. What about input? (Score:4, Insightful)
They just, to me, look a little silly, and that's a result of having an image with more information in it than the medium they are displaying on can handle.
Now, with a display that can ACTUALLY display the full spectrum of a HDR image. THAT I'm interested in.
Why is this story only being posted now though? It's from last year!
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Why would a high dynamic range image be best presented on the lowest dynamic range output available? Any monitor is better for the job than a conventional print. You could just as easily have said that a full color image looks much better in black and white. The ideal output device would have enough dynamic range to display the image without compression.
BTW, HDR imaging is about capturing high dynamic
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Me too! And I sure am glad they included some screenshots in TFA; I can see how they're much better-looking than what my regular old CRT can display! I sat there, dumbfounded, thinking how much wider a dynamic range they had than my actual monitor.
Maybe they can set up a service where you can look at more great HDR photos at home on your regular monitor so you can at least get used to it...
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I have never seen a huge advantage in color prints but B&W, even with HDR, can't quite produce the results film can.
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Depends on what you mean by HDR.
For some people, HDR simply means "a very high dynamic range" (compared to competing products, or the "normal" standards). That's the case with these monitors.
For othr people, HDR means a dynamic range that is greater than your output medium. By definition, a "HDR" monitor can't comply with this definition, although a monitor can certainly be compatible with "HDR input", if both it and the graphics card support it.
An
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In fact, even our eyes' instantaneous dynamic range is far more limited than some people believe. What happens is our brain builds an "HDR" mental picture from multiple "exposures".
Likewise, you can do multiple-shot exposure bracketing on a digital camera (using different shutter speeds), and then load those images into HDRShop (for example) and create an HDR file from t
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A lot of the HDR images made with photoshop have more dynamic range than the human eye does. The human eye can trick one into thinking contrary that however due to how quickly it adapts on changing focus.
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Fuji's S3Pro (and the upcoming S5Pro) do have a extended DR feature that works quite well in many cases. It's far from perfect, but it does improve the results. Basically, it uses adjacent photosites divided into two sets to capture at different intensities (I'm not really sure of the technical aspects, but I guess each set works at a different "ISO value").
Of course this implies a loss of resolution, since you are using 2 captured pixels to create 1 pixel in the final image
Just my 2 centsRe: (Score:2)
Since "true" HDR consumera camera's don't exist (anyone know?),
HDR is a just technique... you take three images at different exposures and blend those images into one. I personally use 1EV difference between each exposure.
Mostly, this is done because digital camera makers are too focussed on the megapixel war and not focussed enough on real improvements. My new D200 has a dynamic range of 11 stops, making certain exposures with a lot of range between the shadows and highlights difficult or impossible.
The H
Good news bad news (Score:1)
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It's interesting that in "graphics", resolution is being pursued first, instead of the bit-depth issue, when the later is just as important.
Cheers
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Color depth is HDR. They are one and the same. A monitor which can faithfully display 48 bit color is an HDR monitor by definition.
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Color depth is HDR
I wouldn't say that. Mainly because basically a high dynamic range means that your range go outside of your traditional 0.0-1.0 range, as color depth is mainly about staying in the 0.0-1.0 range, but with a better precision. This being said, you still can use a greater color depth to display HDR.
It's as if you had a 24-bit sound card, you could turn your 16-bit sounds into 24-bit sounds but 256 times lower, crank up the volume of your speakers so that these sound normal and with the norm
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In both audio and video, this whole idea of quant
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There is no such thing as a 0.0 - 1.0 visual range.
I was talking about the range on the computer/screen side. Your images are stored in the 0.0 - 1.0 range.
you should also realize that the idea of "going outside" the 0.0 - 1.0 range is absurd.
It's all about scaling. And as for the "incredible human senses", our vision may be incredible, but our hearing is hardly good enough to pick up the -93 dB (iirc) noise (with respect to the maximum sample value) that you have with a 16-bit sound.
That's why HDR and
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You can store an entire HDR image in one bit: the spotlight pointed into your eyes is either on or off. That seems to be the point you're making, and I don't think it's particularly relevant to any realistic HDR application.
If you
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The original purpose of gamma correction is to quantize intensity in a way that is perceived as linear. Linear perceived intensity is very important. It results in the best information transfer in a given number of bits. It is also a bedrock assumption of most digital signal processing methods. For example, if you apply a typical smoothing filter to a nonlinear image you will change the overall intensity of the image
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You may have an HDR image, but it will not be a visually realistic HDR image, as I pointed out in another post. You must sacrifice either perceptual linearity or perceptual smoothness in order to fit a 200,000:1 contrast ratio into 8 bits. Few practical applications would consider that a reasonable tradeoff.
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Frustriating that the software will handle 48 bit, three channels of 16, but the monitors won't
That may be frustrating, but there's still a solution to make things look better if you got 48-bit images to display in 24-bit : dynamic random dithering.
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Other HDR technologies I've seen involve far higher barriers to low cost production. Laser projection
That's SOOO 2005... (Score:1)
Published: 4th October 2005 by Geoff Richards
Um, yeah.
saw one at siggraph last year (Score:1)
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That's a bit backwards (Score:2)
You are correct in your description of what is being labeled "HDR" currently. However, you are actually a bit backwards on the subject. HDR is really the gimmick here. It's a trick, a way of approximating reality.
The term HDR is misleading. It's more accurate to describe it as a technique which uses dynamic range compression. Taking a real-life scene with a large dynamic range and compressing it into the limited range available on a monitor or in print. You are not increasing dynamic range, you are merely c
Lightsabers (Score:2)
I'm not sure I'd pay $49,000 for a tv just for that purpose, but it's the best one I could think of. I'd certainly pay that much for a lightsaber though.
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They basically look the way neon lights look when photographed....washed out where they are brightest. Not the way they look when you see them in real life.
Contrast actually goes down to 0 (Score:2)
Apparently this actually breaks the industry equation for deriving contrast (divide by 0), so they had to bump it up to like
Pretty awesome technology.
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Nope. The specified contrast is the ratio of EMITTED, RADIATED light from a bright pixel to EMITTED, RADIATED light from a dark pixel. Certainly, ambient light will reduce the effective contrast in reality, but the definition of specified con
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You are missing the point completely. That "completely useless metric" is exactly the metric that the display industry uses to measure and rate every display device on the market. So far it's done a pretty good job in rating display contrast, so I don't think I'd call it "completely useless".
The entire point was....that metric doesn't exactly work now that there is technology to make a pixel that emits zero luminance, so the metric needs to be fudged a little.
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I'm guessing you didn't RTFA. The entire point of this screen is that it has a large number of small, discrete light sources, each covering no more than a few pixels, each isolated from the others, and each individually adjustable; so a dark area
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Nothing in this world is truly black
If you don't let any photon out then it's trully black. No need to invoke black holes.
What about SED? (Score:1)
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They made up the 200k figure... (Score:4, Informative)
It goes from 0 to 4000cd/m^2. Their comparison model, the LVM-37w1, goes from 0.55 to 550cd/m^2.
So this toy gets as close to true black as you can get - "off", thus constrained by the ambient light level. For white, they manage 4000cd/m^2, or comparable to fairly bright interior lighting.
Consider me impressed, but realistically, this only amounts to roughly an 8x brightness improvement over the best normal displays, with true-black thrown in as a perk (they suspiciously don't mention the next lowest intensity, no doubt because it goes back into the realm of a contrast ratio of only a few thousand.
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Using the "next lowest intensity" as you described gets them to the 200k figure, not only a few thousand. The perfect black, "off", gets you to infinity.
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D'oh! My bad... I must have glazed over for that part, because I seriously didn't notice it. But yeah, I suppose that pretty much negates the bulk of my point.
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This is over a year old (Score:2)
I wonder if these guys..... (Score:1)
Does it create projection-type movie images? (Score:2)
Question: is the image showing up like that purely a function of the brightness of what the person is looking at? IOW, would an HDR monitor have the effect of "projecting" the image out as if one were staring into an overhead?
Someone mentioned above that pictures/video of stained glass windows were often used as demos
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N.B. if you have something like the left si
Too much (Score:1)
4000 cd/m^2 is their models peak luminance. The nice thing about a standard 300 cd/m^2 monitor is that I can stare at a picture of the sun for as long as I want without blinding myself. I'm not sure I would want to do that with one of these... Not because it's enough to blind you or anything, but it could cause your pupils to dialate so when you turn it off everything would be really dark.
probably not worth it (Score:2)
A little more dynamic range than what your average LCD monitor has would be nice, but aiming for reproducing anything resembling the full dynamic range of natural scenes is a waste of time and money.
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And why exactly is this better than.. (Score:1)
One would probably need a bit stronger backlight and maybe special mask between the panes so that ligt form one pixel on one LCD could go just through tha same position on another panel...
Sweet!!!! (Score:4, Funny)
power consumption woes (Score:1)
-G
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Polaroid XR film (Score:5, Interesting)
The result was to extend the useful dynamic range of the film by a factor of 10000 or so--more than a dozen additional f-stops of latitude, or extra Ansel zones, if you like.
The film was processed in regular Kodacolor chemistry (IIRC), each layer coming out a different color. In color, the result was a "false color" image displaying a huge dynamic range of light intensity; or, it could be printed as black-and-white using different filters to select different intensity ranges.
In effect, the photographer was automatically bracketing every shot by a dozen F-stops, in a single shutter click.
It was an incredibly neat hack. I wonder whatever became of it?
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isn't that actually LOW dynamic range? (Score:1)
> where the photographer brackets the exposures and then combines
> the images to increase the dynamic range of the photo.
So instead of an image that goes from black to white, you have an image
that goes from dark grey to light grey. Now you can see all the stuff
that would've been hard to make out in a single photo. I think what has
happened is that you've *decreased* the dynamic range in the photo (or,
more properly speaking, you've
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shameless plug (Score:2)
(as long as the software supports HDR/their DLL)
Wow just think of all the great p0RN!!! (Score:1)
Just think of all the great p0rN you can view with one of these things... you know, all those dark recesses and everything. And haven't we all wondered what was happening in the rest of the room, away from the lights??? And... well, uh... you know.... other stuff too
Now all we need is smell-a-vision!
(Uh... or maybe not!)
Why so expensive? (Score:1)
Isn't this screen basically a commercial LCD with a modified backlight (a couple hundreds of LEDs controlled by a special channel in the signal)?
whats this? 121 coments and no |Dr[]|\| (Score:1)
IS everyone on slashdot o.k.??