HDR= High Dynamic Range Display Systems
There is an almost equally big revolution in display technology taking place. BrightSide Technologies, a team of researchers spun off from the University of British Columbia have developed the world’s first true High Dynamic Range (HDR) display.
BrightSide technology uses LCD technology. Usually LCD displays have a backlight provided by CCFL (Cold Cathode Fluorescent Light) tubes. That’s why even when the LCD screen is black it is not actually black, it still has some residual light: the tube is still turned on. The main idea of BrightSide technology is to remove this CCFL backlight and use several LEDs instead, a technology they call IMLED (Individually Modulated Array of LED backlights).
Brightside are presently launching a 37 inch display designed to meet the needs of these “vision critical” markets. This display provides peak luminance in excess of 3,000 candela/m2, a contrast ratio in excess of 200,000:1 and it is the first display capable of accurately displaying 16 bit per colour channel images
“HDR will revolutionize the visual perception”, believes Professor Karol Myszkowski of the Max-Planck institute for informatics. The brightness of the – quite expensive – Canadian 37-inch-display begins with 0
candela and reaches the brilliance of 3000 cd/m2. The algorithm of the researchers of Saarbruecken gives
the basis, to convert the collected image information which was collected with dynamic sensors in real time.
But also with already existing TV equipment and computer displays you can get into HDR-videos. As at the
Max-Planck- institute for informatics an HDR video player has been developed, which assures the ideal play
back for HDR equipment and also for ordinary displays. But besides IMS Chips and Spheron VR from
Waldfischbach-Burgalbe near to Kaiserslautern there are several other companies involved in the
development of LCD displays for a brighter brightness array and a better color scale. “Eventually all kinds of
displays will benefit from this” says Strobel.