Industry News
2019; Wiley; Volume: 35; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1002/msid.1044
ISSN2637-496X
Autores ResumoOn June 12, the audio-visual retailer Value Electronics held its 15th annual TV Shootout at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York City. Scheduled this year to coincide with CE Week, a tradeshow for the North American tech industry, the shootout pits high-end TVs from premium manufacturers against each other in a range of tests, with an expert panel rating the sets' performance. Value Electronics is based in Scarsdale, New York, but since its owner Robert Zohn created the shootout in 2004, the event has gained an international following, with set manufacturers and content producers paying careful attention to the results. Indeed, in brief comments, Tim Alessi, a senior director of new product development at LG Electronics, said that LG had sent a PQ engineer from Korea to observe the proceedings, adding that “we learn a lot here.” Members of the judges' panel as they evaluate this year's competitors. Image: Mark Jessamy This year's competitors were the LG OLED65C9PUA (OLED), Samsung QN65Q90R (QD-enhanced LCD), Sony XBR-65A9G (OLED), and Sony XBR-65Z9F (RG-phosphor-enhanced LCD). The sets were calibrated using Portrait Displays' CalMAN 2019 professional calibration software. Kevin Miller, the owner of ISFTV, a product development consultancy that provides professional calibration services, described the painstaking process: The first step was to calibrate the $34,000 Sony BVM-X300 OLED reference monitor using a Judd modified gray scale, which is slightly blue. Then, a full-screen D65 for each set is matched to the monitor, which looks the same on each set. The Judd gray scale was designed for RGB OLED displays, Miller said, and avoids the green cast that was seen in past shootouts. Most of the content used for the evaluation had been mastered at 1000 nits peak luminance, but some had been mastered at 4000 nits, which is becoming more and more common. None of the sets could display even a small highlight at 4000 nits, but the LCDs were probably in 2000-nit territory for a 10 percent white patch. The challenge for each set was how well it could reduce the peaks to fit into its own color volume and still tone map colors and intermediate luminance levels. They also needed to produce color fidelity at all luminance levels and good detail in both bright and dark areas. In his introductory remarks, Joel Silver, the president and founder of the Imaging Science Foundation, said the goal should be to make tone mapping obsolete by developing TVs that display a true 4000 nits. But in the foreseeable future, this will be doable only for high-end Ultra HD LCD sets and it may not be possible for OLED TVs, which have trouble reaching 1000 nits for a 10 percent screen area. For that reason, this could well be the last year that the shootout is able to use an OLED reference monitor. Although Sony will continue to supply the BVM-X300 to those who ask for it, the company is now pushing its new dual-cell LCD mastering monitor. During the day-long judging process, both the audience and the expert panel, which included HDTV journalists and reviewers, post-production and visual effects specialists, and other industry professionals, commented on how good all four sets were and how similar to each other and the reference monitor they were for most of the input signals in dark and bright ambients. Still, in SDR (standard dynamic range, or BT.709) mode, the LG OLED had a very distinct yellow cast to its colors. In HDR, the yellow cast persisted but was very subtle. The Sony LCD had a more saturated red than the other three sets. This often looked pleasing, but it was also more saturated that the reference monitor. This over-saturation was attributed by several of us in the audience to the use of (most likely) GE's TriGain red phosphor. (Sony obtains its wide LCD color gamut not with quantum dots but by incorporating red and green phosphors within the blue LED packages used in the backlight unit.) Dark detail was good on all four sets, and represented a remarkable improvement for Samsung. Last year's high-end Samsung QD set left large areas of black in very dark scenes where other sets showed a wealth of detail. Moreover, last year's Samsung QLED set also had the worst halo effect, which is obvious when a star field is shown. The creative intent is to show the stars as bright pin-pricks with the deep black of space between them. When the halo effect is extreme, the black space is replaced by a milky glow. But again, this year Samsung was considerably better. So which was the “King of TV,” to use Robert Zohn's description? The judges named the Sony A9F OLED the Best TV in SDR Day Mode, and also the best in SDR Reference (dark room) Mode. The A9F and LG C9P OLED tied for Best Streaming TV, in which each set's streaming decoder had to deal with a compressed signal. The judges said the overall Best HDR TV was the Sony A9G OLED TV. But best of what? The best of these four, of course. These sets were taken from Value Electronics stock, so manufacturers did not have a chance to supply souped-up testing specials. Still, there are sets that VE doesn't carry, such as the new Vizio P-Series Quantum X with 3000 nits, 240Hz effective refresh rate, and 384 dimming zones. By this time next year Hisense may have released its dual cell LCD, which looked great in prototype form at the Nanosys booth at SID Display Week in May. In the back of the room, Robert Brennan, a product technical manager for home entertainment and sound at Sony, showed the company's 85-inch Z9G Master Series 8K LCD with “direct LED” backlighting and backlight master drive, which has an “ultra-dense LED structure, a unique local dimming algorithm and optical design.” Brennan said this is the only TV on the market to have anything like this technology. The Z9G was not in competition (only 4K TVs were included in the event), but there should be more than one 8K set available by next year. Ken Werner is the principal of Nutmeg Consultants and specializes in display manufacturing, technology, and applications. He can be reached at kwerner@nutmegconsultants.com.
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