You Asked: Brightness meters, and who wins the natural color contest

1 week ago 4

On today’s You Asked: Is the Hisense 110 UX really the brightest TV ever made? How do you make sure your TV is doing the upscaling rather than your Blu-ray player? And – the big one this week – do older TVs like CRT and Plasma TVs actually have better color than modern TVs?

Is the Hisense 110UX really the brightest TV ever made?

Frank Lujan writes: I would like to know what version of Calman software you used for the Hisense 110 UX review, as well as the meter that can reach those nit levels (18,000)?

For the test, I used Calman Ultimate, also known as Calman Business (I think it was the 5.15.7.2 version). I am currently using the Calibrite Display Plus HL, which is rated for up to 10,000 nits, although it’s known to go much higher — to what degree of accuracy is unclear. I wouldn’t try to calibrate a display for a professional user with that tool, but it will get close. Calman has a built-in profile for that meter. For grins, I profiled it in SDR with an i1Pro 2, which is slower, but much more accurate, and then tested the results I got both with Calman’s profile and my own, and they were identical.

I could leave it at that, but I’m just going to go a bit further.

When I got those super high nit readings, I sent them to Hisense and asked them to check my work — they confirmed results in the same ballpark. Also, the Linus Tech Tips channel recently ran through the 110 UX, and used a Klein K10-A meter, I believe, which is extremely fancy and accurate and expensive. They got a reading as high as 24,000, although they settled in at 17,000 in more realistic testing conditions, which is close to the 18,000 I got – a negligible difference.

I’m comfortable with my results, but more to the point, that peak brightness move is a party trick. In reality, the TV is unlikely to put out anything that bright, even in a small specular highlight during real content. There’s no denying, though, that it’s the brightest TV I’ve ever tested and is, I believe, the brightest consumer TV ever made. You don’t need a meter to see it – subjectively, it’s quite obvious.

How can you ensure your TV is handling the upscaling?

Phil Santiago writes in wondering how he can tell whether his Sony 4K Blu-ray player or his TV is doing the upscaling work. He has an 85-inch Sony X95L and the Sony UBP-X800M2, and often watches standard Blu-ray discs, which are 1080p, and he wants to make sure he’s getting the best experience. Recently, while watching Land Before Time, Phil noticed the image looked grainy and thought that, if it was his premium TV processor doing the upscaling work, it wasn’t doing a great job.

First, let’s check the settings on the Sony UBP-X800M2. On the remote, press the Home button to bring up the main menu. Go to Setup and select Screen Settings. In the Screen Settings menu, look for the Output Resolution setting and set it Auto or Original. You may be able to turn off 4K upscaling more directly, depending on the player and its region. If you see a 4K upscale setting, turn it off. If there is an HDMI output setting, set it to match the native resolution there as well.

For anyone experiencing this issue, I would recommend making these adjustments if your TV has a super-premium processor, as it is likely to be better than the one in your player.

However, with these settings updates, don’t expect a much better picture out of Land Before Time or similar titles. Land Before Time is hand-drawn and hand-painted animation that was captured by a camera and printed on 35mm film stock. As such, the original film, which would be digitally scanned, will have film grain and a softness that you don’t get from digital animation — the quality of transfer from film to digital can vary widely. (A quick search shows that the transfer for this title is kind of “mid.”)

Film grain is difficult to deal with from a capture and display perspective. With a really good scan, a digital version can retain a lot of the original film’s character. It’s hard for TV processors — even the best ones — to distinguish intentional film grain from “noise.” When a processor tries to clean up noise, it can sometimes introduce other visual artifacts in the process. Sometimes you can reduce this effect by turning off all digital noise reduction features, but that can also exacerbate film grain in a way that calls unwanted attention to it.

Also, the larger the screen, the more obvious these artifacts will be: 1080p can look amazing in many cases. and it’s harder to make 720p look good on a large 4K TV — anything below that resolution is simply not going to look great. It’s a crude saying, but you can’t polish a turd. Another more tactful way of expressing that sentiment might be garbage in, garbage out, which seems rude when we’re talking about someone’s art.

Do older TVs like CRT have better color than modern TVs?

Matthew writes: I was wondering if it’s true that the incandescent light used for older TVs like plasma and CRT is better at producing the full range of color? I have read that the light quality of today’s TVs is worse because LED light cuts the visible color spectrum in order to draw less power and produce less heat.

Let’s start with the fact that no TVs use incandescent light bulbs to help make a picture – not today, anyway. And even if they did, the bulbs would not help to make more natural color.

A CRT TV uses electron beams from three guns to excite phosphors (materials that emit light when exposed to an external energy source) that glow red, green, or blue when you shoot electronics at them. The phosphors in CRT TVs were able to create very high-quality red, green, and blue colors, and thus the white light they put out when the three colors were combined could be very accurate.

Plasma TVs used UV light to excite gasses – usually neon or xenon — in pixels. And those gasses could also create very high-quality red, green, and blue pixels, which, when combined, also created very good white light.

LED backlit TVs use an LED light, typically blue, which is coated with a yellow phosphor to help create white light. Then, that white light is carved into red, green, and blue using color filters. However, this approach caused TVs to have a hard time creating accurate white light and colors.

The introduction of quantum dots, found in most QLED TVs, helped solve this issue by helping create higher-quality red, green, and blue light, thus creating more accurate white light.

OLED TVs — WRGB OLEDs (sometimes shortened to WOLED) or QD-OLEDs — don’t have a backlight. The OLED compounds in these TVs glow when electricity is applied to them; there is no outside light source. WRGB OLEDs use a blue OLED coated with a yellow phosphor to create white light, which is then filtered into colors. QD-OLEDs use a blue OLED to excite red and green quantum dots for a pure RGB display.

The colors that OLED TVs create are extremely accurate. They are narrow bandwidth, which means that in a WOLED. the color filter doesn’t have to work very hard to create accurate red, green, and blue, and the QD OLED doesn’t need a color filter at all. This is why the color on QD-OLED TVs is so revered, and why these TVs can create colors no other TV technology can.

Some TVs create white light and then use filters to carve out red, green, and blue, while other TVs create red, green, and blue and combine them to create white light. In either case, the most important factor involved in getting accurate color is to have very narrow peaks on red, green, and blue. You don’t want your white light to be too blue (cold) or too warm (red).

We know which TVs produce the most accurate color because they can be measured objectively with tools. And not only do OLED and some QLED TVs create more accurate colors than most CRT and Plasma TVs, they cover a much wider color gamut and can also have a higher color volume.

In any case, to get the very best results from any TV, it must be calibrated. Some TVs are extremely accurate right out of the box (if you pick the most accurate picture preset), while other TVs need a bit more help.

But once the display is set up — or calibrated — today’s modern TVs create more accurate color and express whatever the creator intended (whether they wanted it to look “natural” or not is another discussion). The Matrix, for instance, is a movie where nothing is natural — its green cast is by design.

So why do some folks swear that CRT and Plasma TVs look more natural? It may be that they are a bit more muted, or look and feel more familiar. They don’t get as bright — and high brightness color can feel jarring.

Also, these TVs have less going on inside, so the slight bias toward green (as is the case with WOLED) or magenta (as is the case with QD-OLED) isn’t something that has to be calibrated out.

By the way, there is a difference between what a tool says is accurate and what our eyes say is accurate. Which is why the best calibrators will use both their own measurements combined with their visual expertise to dial in a TV so it looks its best.

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