It's a safe bet that a good number of our readers are hockey fans as well as videophiles. If that describes you, you should mark January 23, 2016 in your calendar. That night, the Montreal Canadiens face off against the Maple Leafs at Toronto's Air Canada Centre. The Saturday-night game will be the first of more than 20 marquee NHL games that Rogers Sportsnet will offer in 4K video.
If hockey's not your game, you might want to circle April 8 in your calendar. That's when the Boston Red Sox visit the Rogers Centre for the Toronto Blue Jays' 2016 home opener. Sportsnet plans to offer all 81 Blue Jays home games in ultra-high-definition (UHD), not just with 4K resolution, but with HDR (high dynamic range) video as well.
If you're not big into video, terms like UHD, 4K and HDR may seem like technological bafflegab, intended to sow confusion. In fact, they all refer to the next step forward in TV technology, taking it beyond HDTV to something better - to ultra-HDTV.
You'll often hear the terms "UHD" and "4K" used interchangeably, but that usage isn't exactly correct. HDTV screens and programming max out at approximately two million pixels: 1,920 horizontal by 1,080 vertical. UHD has four times as many pixels: 3,840 by 2,160. You can think of "4K" as an abbreviation for the number of horizontal pixels, with a rounding error thrown in.
Those extra pixels allow the UHD TVs to convey much finer details. "That kind of resolution is like putting your living room on the baseball diamond, or at centre ice," says Aaron Lazarus, Director of Public Affairs for Rogers Communications Inc. "It can make you feel closer to the action than the first base coach or the linesman."
On October 5 at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, Rogers Communications announced plans to offer 20 NHL games in 4K resolution starting next January. All 81 home games of the Toronto Blue Jays for the 2016 season will be available in 4K, with HDR video. Rogers will also offer 100 hours of 4K content through the Shomi video-streaming service. "This is going to be a 4K Christmas," predicted Rogers CEO Guy Laurence at the event.
That's true in theory. In practice, you need a big screen to really benefit from 4K resolution, and you need close enough that it encompasses most of your field of vision. Viewing a 50" TV from across a normal size room, there's not a big difference between HDTV and 4K. But there's more to UHD than 4K resolution.
When fully implemented, UHD can deliver not just more detail, but also a broader range of tones and colours. With baseball, that could allow bright details like highlights on players' helmets to be rendered convincingly, rather than being blown out. At the opposite end of the tonal scale, HDR should allow dark details like textures in umpires' jackets to be resolved, rather than being crushed to black.
It's a pity that Rogers isn't offering NHL games in HDR next year, because that could really help convey the dazzling experience of a live hockey game, holding detail in the ice under bright lights, and in players' uniforms as well. Even it doesn't arrive this season, HDR will certainly come to hockey at some point.
Ultra HD also gives program providers the option of delivering a broader range of colours, a capability known as "wide colour gamut." WCG allows for shades, such as the deep red of a London bus or the brilliant blue-green of a Caribbean beach, that can't be encoded with regular TV.
The benefits of HDR and WCG can be appreciated on any size screen, at any reasonable viewing distance. Because of this, I prefer the more-encompassing "UHD" as a descriptor for this new video technology, rather than "4K," which just refers to resolution.
Until now, there has been a smattering of 4K sports programming, such as the 2014 FIFA World Cup Finals. But there have been no regular 4K sports broadcasts anywhere - and nothing at all in HDR. Which makes the Rogers announcement a pretty big deal.
A VISUAL FEAST
Rogers made the blockbuster announcement at the Rogers Centre on October 5, right at the beginning of the Blue Jays' playoff run. These games will be available to Rogers Cable subscribers, but will require a new set-top box. There will be versions of the 4K box with and without recording functionality, Lazarus says. Rogers hasn't announced what it will charge for the terminal, or for 4K video service.
Under Canada's telecommunications regulations, Rogers has to make this content available to other cable, satellite and IPTV services, and the company has confirmed that its 4K Sportsnet feed will be available to other providers. At presstime, none had announced plans to carry Sportsnet in 4K. But Montreal-based Videotron Ltd. announced a 4K set-top box back in August, so it's reasonable to expect that the company will make Sportsnet 4K available to its customers in Quebec.
What about videophiles who aren't sports fans? Rogers promises "over 100 hours of 4K movies, series and TV shows" on Shomi, the video-streaming service it co-owns with Shaw Communications Inc. Rogers also announced a partnership with Netflix, whereby original Netflix series, such as House of Cards, Sense8 and Narco, will be available on Rogers' 4K box.
Of course, Netflix's 4K offerings are also available through the smart-TV apps on virtually all 4K TVs. Besides several original series, Netflix offers some 4K nature documentaries, plus all five seasons of Breaking Bad. In the U.S., Netflix has some compelling feature movies in 4K, such as Skyfall and Star Trek: Into Darkness.
Last January, Netflix announced plans to offer 4K content with HDR during 2015, and some tantalizing previews. Season 1 of Marco Polo is reportedly being remastered in HDR, and will be available this year. Season 2 is being shot in HDR, and will be available in 4K and HDR upon release.
Judging by demonstrations at recent tradeshows and dealer events, viewers are in for a visual feast when full-blown Ultra HD television appears. I recall being blown away by a nighttime scene from Life of Pi on a new Samsung UHD television at a tradeshow earlier this year, with stars sparkling brilliantly against a black sky, and phosphorescent marine life clearly visible below the surface of the ocean. The brilliant daytime scene was every bit as compelling, with detail preserved in the brilliant sky and surf, and also in the white lifeboat and tarpaulin. At its best, HDR video has a pop that regular HDTV just can't match.
COMING ATTRACTIONS
There will be another source of UHD content early next year: Ultra HD Blu-ray. The new format will be backward-compatible with today's Blu-ray format, so that you can spin your old discs on the new players. Samsung both Ultra HD Blu-ray players at the IFA tradeshow in Berlin in September. Samsung and Panasonic both confirm that they will have Ultra HD Blu-ray in Canada in early 2016. There will certainly be other companies with the new players as well.
At CES 2015, Panasonic showed a prototype Ultra HD Blu-ray player. The Ultra HD Blu-ray spec was finalized during the summer, and at IFA Berlin in September, Samsung announced a player while Twentieth Century Fox announced its first slate of Ultra HD Blu-ray releases. It's a sure bet that Ultra HD Blu-ray players will be introduced by many brands at CES 2016.
Joel Silver, President and Founder of the Imaging Science Foundation, a Florida company that trains home-theatre dealers to calibrate TVs and video projectors, was able to borrow a prototype player for testing back in the summer. "I didn't want to send it back in the worst possible way," he recalls.
Also at IFA, Fox Home Entertainment announced its first slate of Ultra HD Blu-ray titles: Exodus: Gods and Kings, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Fantastic Four, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Life of Pi, The Maze Runner and Wild, all of them with 4K resolution and HDR video.
Then in early November, Sony Pictures Entertainment announced that it will offer The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Salt, Hancock, Chappie, Pineapple Express and The Smurfs 2 on Ultra HD Blu-ray, followed "by a growing roster of titles including new-release film and television content."
Some 2015 UHD televisions like Sony's X850 series are HDR-ready, allowing for images with an expanded range of tones and colours. At CES, we can expect new UHD TVs with full HDR support from all major brands, as well as new Ultra HD Blu-ray players. In November, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment announced its first batch of Ultra Blu-ray titles, which will include The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has already announced several titles mastered in Dolby Vision, which is an optional video-encoding format on Ultra HD Blu-ray. These include San Andreas, Mad Max: Fury Road, Magic Mike XXL, Jupiter Ascending, Man of Steel and The Great Gatsby.
Since the spring, several studios have released movies for display in Dolby Cinema theatres, which feature Dolby Atmos immersive audio and ultra-high-contrast Dolby Viaion projection systems. These titles include Inside Out and Tomorrowland from Disney; The Hunger Games: Mockingjay from Lionsgate; Mission: Impossible - The Rogue Trials from Paramount; The Perfect Guy and Pixels from Sony Pictures; Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials and The Martian from Twentieth Century Fox; Everest from Universal; Pan and San Andreas from Warner Bros. You gotta think these titles will appear on Ultra HD Blu-ray sooner rather than later.
We'll also see studios reaching into their vaults and re-releasing old titles in Ultra HD Blu-ray. Silver says that process has been streamlined with the introduction of professional equipment that automates the first pass of converting a movie to HDR. Typically, the automated process will successfully upconvert 80% of the footage, Silver says, "and the colourist can take over from there."
UHD CHECKLIST
The checklist of what you need to get these visual treats is a little complicated: a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms, protocols and specs. To understand why, we need to peek under the hood.
Today's HDTV standard has about two million pixels, each containing a red, blue and green sub-pixel. Each of these three colours is digitally encoded as an eight-bit binary number, allowing for a total of 16 million different shades. To encode the greater range of tones and colours that HDR can deliver, you need more numbers. Consequently, UHD supports 10-bit encoding for red, green and blue, allowing more than a billion different shades to be encoded.
To enjoy UHD pictures with HDR video, you need a TV with a 10-bit panel and 10-bit processing. Quite a few of the 4K ultra-high-definition TVs on the market today have eight-bit panels. These TVs of course can display images with 4K resolution, but they can't display HDR and WCG images. That doesn't mean that they'll show a blank screen when fed a UHD signal with HDR video. More typically (but not necessarily), they'll show a 4K image, but without the extra contrast and colour than HDR/WCG provides. To put it another way, the detail will be ultra-high-def (4K), but colour and tonality will be regular HDTV.
To display HDR images, the TV also needs internal software that can respond to the extra data that delivers the enhanced contrast and colour. To put it more simply, the TV has to be HDR-ready. Many (but not all) of the UHD televisions introduced this year are HDR-ready. They're either capable of displaying HDR pictures, or will be following a software update that the manufacturer will send to the TV over the Internet.
Hisense's curved 65" 65H10 4K television is HDR-ready. It employs quantum-dot technology for expanded colour gamut, and full-array backlighting with 240-zone local dimming for maximum contrast.
There are different ways that UHD televisions will get UHD content. One way is through an Internet streaming service like Netflix, accessed through the TV's built-in smart-TV software. Another way is from an external component like a UHD set-top box or Ultra HD Blu-ray player.
The new set-top boxes and Ultra Blu-ray players will connect to the TV with a familiar HDMI cable; but for full-blown UHD, the TV will require the latest version of HDMI: HDMI 2.0a, along with HDCP 2.2 copy protection. The importance of robust copy protection was underscored in August, when the encryption system used by Netflix for its 4K service was hacked, and a 4K version of the pilot for Breaking Bad appeared in the wild.
Many UHD televisions with older flavours of HDMI and HDCP will be able to get UHD services like Netflix through their internal smart-TV apps. They may connect to new 4K set-top boxes and Ultra HD Blu-ray players, and play UHD content. But in that case, UHD content will be scaled back to regular HD.
The bottom line: If you're in the market for a new television and this capability is important to you, you should ask the salesperson, "Is this TV HDR-ready?"
WHO'S READY?
Most TV manufacturers are now in their third or fourth generation of UHD products. With 2015 models, buyers can take it for granted the television will support Netflix's 4K service. First-generation models did not.
But manufacturers vary in their support of HDR and WCG video. The ability to read HDR streams can be enabled via a firmware update. Similarly, HDMI 2.0 can be enhanced to HDMI 2.0a (which adds HDR support) by updating firmware. However, HDCP 2.2 compatibility requires dedicated hardware. If it's not built into the set, it can't be added afterward.
Hisense: This rapidly growing Chinese brand has two series of 4K TVs for 2015. The H7 series includes a 50-incher at $999, a 55-incher at $1,299 and 65-incher at $2,299. There's just one model in the flagship H10 series, the 65" 65H10 at $3,500. This curved-screen model uses quantum-dot technology, which allows it to produce a broader range of colours. It also uses a full-array backlighting system, with LEDs behind the screen rather than along the perimeter, and a local-dimming system that can reduce the brightness of LEDs in dark areas of the picture and boost it in bright areas. This feature, typically offered only on premium TVs, is especially important with HDR content, because it boosts maximum brightness without washing out dark areas. "We can control each LED," says Lindsay Takashima, Vice President Sales and Marketing for Hisense Canada Co., Ltd. "The contrast is phenomenal."
A firmware update will add HDMI 2.0a compliance, making the 65H10 compatible with external components like Ultra HD Blu-ray players and UHD set-top boxes. "The plan for next year is that all of our 4K models will be HDR-capable," Takashima says.
LG's 65EG9600 65" curved OLED UHD television can display 4K video from Netflix, and will support high dynamic range when Netflix begins offering HDR video. It has HDMI 2.0a connectivity with support for HDCP 2.2 copy protection, providing compatibility with components like Ultra HD Blu-ray players and 4K cable boxes.
LG: With their anthracite-deep blacks, OLED (organic light-emitting diode) televisions seem tailor-made for HDR. Whereas LCD TVs have a light source behind or around the screen, OLED TVs have self-illuminating pixels, so that no light at all is emitted in black areas of the picture. LG is the only manufacturer currently offering big-screen OLED TVs in North America.
In November, LG began shipping two curved-screen UHD OLED televisions to Canadian dealers: the 55" 55EG9200 at $4,500 and 65" 65EG9600 at $8,000. On both TVs, a firmware update will enable HDR capability from the built-in streaming app for Netflix. On the 55EG9200, the HDMI port can't be upgraded to read HDR signals from external UHD components like Ultra HD Blu-ray players and UHD set-top boxes. But the 65EG9600 has HDMI 2.0a connectivity and HDCP 2.2 support, providing full compatibility with external UHD components.
Panasonic: Not surprisingly, HDR support is not offered on Panasonic's two carry-over flagship UHD TVs from 2014: the 65" TC-65AX900 and 85" TC-85AX850. But Panasonic's 2015 UHD models will support HDR video with a firmware update. They have HDMI 2.0a ports with HDCP 2.2 compatibility, for connection to UHD components like Ultra HD Blu-ray players and 4K set-top boxes.
There are nine models, starting with the 50" TC-50CX600 at $1,500 and extending to the 55" TC-55CX850 at $2,500 and 65" TC-65CX850 at $3,500. The CX850 series employs a backlighting system with phosphor-treated LEDs. This enables the 65-incher to produce 98% of the DCI colour space used in digital cinemas.
Samsung: Samsung's brands its premium UHD models as S'UHD, all of them employing a quantum-dot layer that extends colour gamut, a feature that Samsung markets as "Nano Crystal Colour."
At IFA, Samsung announced a firmware update for its S'UHD lineup, as well as its more conventional UHD line, that will enable HDMI 2.0a compatibility so that they can receive HDR data from Ultra HD Blu-ray players and UHD set-top boxes.
Samsung is unique in providing backward compatibility to premium models from previous years, through a One Connect Box that connects to a proprietary port on the TV. Priced at $400, the 2015 UHD One Connect Box provides HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 compatibility to 2013 and 2014 models, as well as support for the HEVC video encoding format used by Netflix for UHD streaming, and the VP9 format used by YouTube for its 4K content. "With the One Connect Box, as 4K evolves, we can evolve along with it," says Pat Bugos, Vice President Sales and Marketing for Samsung Electronics Canada Inc.
Sony: In September, Sony released a firmware update for all of its 2015 4K televisions that adds HDR compatibility. Available in 55", 65" and 75" sizes, the X850 series features phosphor-treated LEDs that deliver an expanded colour gamut, a feature Sony markets as "Triluminos," and Sony's X1 processor for managing HDR content. A similar feature set is offered on the super-slim X900/X910 series, also available in 55", 65" and 75" sizes. Employing top and bottom edge-lighting, the 65" XBR-65X930 adds zone dimming for improved contrast. Sony's flagship UHD TV, the 75" XBR-75X940, has full-array LED backlighting with local dimming. "HDR is incredible on that TV," says Karol Warminiec, National Manager, Training and Events, for Sony of Canada Ltd. "Everybody who sees it, their jaw just drops."
Vizio: In Canada, Vizio offers nine M-series UHD TVs, with screen sizes ranging from 43" to 80", and prices ranging from $760 to $5,530. All 2015 models have HDMI 2.0 connectivity and HDCP 2.2 support, so can be used with external components like 4K set-top boxes and Ultra HD Blu-ray players. They also feature full-array LED backlighting with local dimming (28 zones on the 43-incher, 32 zones on all the others). But they're not HDR-ready.
A UHD CHRISTMAS
On its own, compatibility with new UHD formats doesn't guarantee a great picture. To really enjoy UHD images and HDR, you need a display with high peak brightness, deep blacks, high contrast (either through well-implemented backlight control or self-emissive technologies like OLED), and wide colour gamut. And of course you need great content.
UHD televisions have been on the market for about three years - though the first models were very expensive. But they have become much more affordable. According to the NPD Group, a company that tracks retail sales of a variety of product categories, the average selling price for UHD televisions sold in Canada during the nine months ending September 30, 2015 was 34% lower than in the same period a year ago. During that period, Canadian unit sales of UHD televisions were 380% higher than the same period a year ago; and dollar sales were 215% higher. Of the TVs 55" and larger in the first nine months of 2015, 24% were UHD; and UHD accounted for 37% of the dollars spent by Canadians on TVs 55" and larger.
Available in 50", 55" and 60" sizes, Samsung's new JS7000-series UHD TVs feature HDR support, quantum-dot technology for improved colour purity, and UHD dimming for improved contrast.
Until recently, UHD were used almost exclusively for viewing HDTV content, upconverted by the TV's processing circuitry to 4K. Now with the Rogers announcement and forthcoming Ultra HD Blu-ray players, we'll have the real deal.
"This is going to be a 4K Christmas," predicted Rogers CEO Guy Laurence at his company's October 5 announcement. Given this rush of new content, it's hard to argue with him. But I'd rather Laurence have forecast a "UHD Christmas."