A year ago, high dynamic range (HDR) was not part of
anybody's stated technical envelope for advanced generation television. Now, all major TV makers are at least
mentioning it. In his SID keynote address, Kazumasa Nomoto, Senior GM of Sony's
Display Device Development Division, specifically mentioned HDR as part of the
envelope of future TVs, and at this year's CES, Sharp showed an HDR technology
demonstrator using Dolby technology.
On the show floor at SID 2014, Nanosys' 10-foot-by-10-foot
booth won a Best in Show award in the small exhibit category. Nanosys, which makes the quantum dots used in
3M's quantum-dot enhancement film (QDEF), was showing two TV sets side-by-side: one was a conventional LCD TV; the second
incorporated both QDEF and Dolby's HDR technology, and the image was
compelling. But what does QDEF have to
do with HDR?
Nanosys' Jeff Yurek told me that QDEF turns out to be a
critical tool in reducing the cost and power consumption of HDR, which up to
now have limited the technology to very expensive professional monitors.
Dolby's current technology uses 2300 red, green, and blue light-emitting diodes
in a full-matrix backlight array.
Controlling the LEDs in clusters, known as local-area-dimming, is the
key to HDR, and Dolby is currently controlling the LEDs individually. Some of the LEDs are very inefficient, with
the result that lots of heat is generated and the power consumption is very
high.
However, if only efficient blue LEDs are used and the QDEF
is used to convert the blue light to red and green, power consumption would be
reduced. For consumer television, it is
likely that the number of LEDs would be sharply reduced. This side-by-side
comparison drew a lot of attention, creating heavier traffic around the Nanosys
booth. – Ken Werner
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