The ITU has announced a new standard for High Dynamic Range Television (HDR-TV) that represents a major advance in television broadcasting.
ITU’s Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) has developed the standard in collaboration with experts from the television industry, broadcasting organizations and regulatory institutions in its Study Group 6.
“HDR-TV will bring a whole new viewing experience to audiences around the world,” said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao, welcoming the announcement. “TV programming will be enhanced with brighter pictures that add sparkle to entertainment and realism to news coverage.”
François Rancy, Director of the ITU Radiocommunication Bureau, affirmed that the new standard is an important step towards the virtual-reality quality of experience to be delivered by future broadcasting and multimedia systems.
The HDR-TV Recommendation details two options for producing High Dynamic Range TV images. The Perceptual Quantization (PQ) specification achieves a very wide range of brightness levels using a transfer function that is finely tuned to match the human visual system.
The Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) specification meanwhile offers compatibility with legacy displays by more closely matching the previously established television transfer curves.
The recommendation also outlines a simple conversion process between the two HDR-TV options.
Moreover, it allows TV producers to choose from three levels of detail or resolution: HDTV (1920 by 1080), and UHDTV ‘4K’ (3840 by 2160) and ‘8K’ (7680 by 4320) – all of which use the progressive imaging system with extended color gamut and range of frame-rates in ITU’s UHDTV Recommendation BT.2020.
Andy Quested, Chairman of ITU-R Working Party 6C (WP 6C), which developed the new standard, said program makers today need a much wider range of options to meet the expectations of the different platforms they must supply, and this need for flexibility is catered for within the framework of a stable ITU-R Recommendation.