There may be several aspects of reality reproduction. I dont see why the lack of stereoscopy should be an argument against striving for realistic dynamic range.
I've been away for a few days due to slight flooding problems.
I would never argue that because one aspect of reality is lacking one should not strive to get other aspects right. My point was, if reproduction of reality is your goal, rather than creating an image to your taste which, although strongly based upon the real scene because it's a photograph, is probably also at least slightly fictitious to some degree with regard to the manner of post-processing, then a 3-D image may go further towards creating that sense of reality, of being there, than an extra couple of stops of DR.
Bracketing only solves the capture problem, not the entire reproduction chain.
Post processing is required for all images whether they are bracketed or not, unless one allows the camera to do the job. And of course, bracketing doesn't always solve the capture problem if there is movement either in the scene or of the camera.
You are assuming that the monitor covers only a small field of view of the viewer. I dont think that your assumption is generally true. I went to the movies yesterday, and the big screen covered a substantial part of my FOV.
Yes. It's generally true if one is referring to monitors for image processing. Big screens in the cinema, or big projections on the wall, could hardly be described as monitors for image processing. If the big screen in the cinema were to display the full dynamic range of the real scene in order to reproduce reality, you'd no longer be sitting in a darkened room. It would be like sitting in one's lounge at home looking out of a large window onto the praire, with cowboys and Indians galloping by. Your lounge room would inevitably be very well lit with such a large window.
If that function is needed, it shoud be applied automatically, in the screen (as that is often the only component that has any idea about how large the viewer fov is. Large displays, projectors, or people sitting with their nose up against the monitor/paper should be able to cover close to 180 degrees of their viewer (with some artifacts).
The monitor can have no idea of the field of view from the viewer's perspective, which is dependent upon the distance between the viewer and the monitor as well as the FoV of the original scene. At the actual scene of a landscape shot, taken with a moderately wide-angle lens, it's necessary to turn one's head to some degree, either to the left and to the right, or up to the sky and down to the foreground, in order to focus clearly on each part of the scene.
When viewing that captured scene on a 24" monitor, or even a 65" TV from an appropriate viewing distance, a slight movement of the eyeballs is all that's required to encompass the entire FoV of the displayed picture. The further you are from the monitor, the less the movement of the eyeballs required.
Plasmas are usually limited to 2 megapixels. That may be an issue for critical applications if the image is to be seen very large.
Few monitors for image processing boast a higher resolution than 2mp, although I'm thinking of getting a 30" NEC model that claims a resolution of 2560x1600.
The larger the screen, the further away one can view it. The monitor I'm using to write this, is a small 17" model which I'm viewing from a distance of around 2 ft. If I were using my 65" Plasma HDTV as a computer monitor, I'd be viewing it from a distance of 2-3 metres. A 2mp image on a small monitor viewed from a close distance will provide no more detail than the same 2mp image viewed on a larger monitor from an appropriately greater distance.
The black point may be affeced by incident light. In other words, your room may have to be painted black to come nar the quoted DR.
Absolutely correct! I made this point earlier in the thread. The lower the DR of the monitor or display, the darker the room needs to be in order to produce even a semblance of reality. It's why cinemas are darkened rooms, and it's why you need to darken your living room when using a video projector in place of a TV.
Further, I believe that the maximum brightness is not all that much from plasmas, giving further problems with other light sources, and possibly issues if the absolute brightness of a scene have perceptual relevance.
In my opinion, the maximum brightness of the plasma screen is totally sufficient. If it were any brighter it would cause eye strain. However, the blacks are more detailed on the plasma screen, provided that the viewing conditions are reasonably suitable.
Still images that have been processed in Photoshop, converted to sRGB, downsized then saved as maximum quality jpegs, look remarkably sharp and vibrant on a 65" plasma screen from a distance of about 10ft or 3 metres. There's no sense of any loss of DR, shadow detail or any loss of detail at all. In fact there's an increased sense of realism compared with a much higher resolution print of the same scene, of the same size, viewed from the same distance.
I have been told that plasmas can produce very black blacks, but that there is a "hole" in the tonal range between the blackest level, and the next blackest. Supposedly this is connected to plasma inherently being PWM-devices of a limited switching speed, and turning a pixel "off" is easy, but turning it "nearly off" means having one bright cycle and many dark cycles, something that cause flickering. If they cannot produce a perceptually uniform gray scale from black to white, then all the DR in the world may not make them good for this application.
Who cares if there's a hole between the blackest black and the next blackest when you have a contrast ratio of 2 million to one (and now 5 million to one in the latest models)? Also, the refresh rate of these new Panasonic plasmas is 600Hz, which is the smallest number divisible by all the main video and movie frame rates, such as 24Hz, 25Hz, 30Hz, 50Hz and 60Hz. I've never noticed any flicker in any part of the display of any still image. Not even in the deepest shadows.
I see no problem here.
