i was looking at one of the new oled tv's from LG on display at one of the local big-box stores. it occurred to me, is it really necessary to have such deep dark black levels for a good picture? or more to the point, do you really want that? or am i just too used to 90 years of poor quality tv broadcast and movies? Perhaps you were watching in a brightly lit room where the ambient lighting "drowned" the nuances of "dark" vs "black" tones on display?
it could make the displayable color range broader and contrast between FULL ON BRIGHT etc..., but it always seems to that real life has no blacks that dark. you'd want to see detail in the shadows no?
the store demo mode in generally looked way over saturated and they "were not able" to show other content on the unit.
thanks,
Sounds to me that the tvs in question (and/or the content you looked at) had an effective gamma that crushed blacks (perhaps in order to give the illusion of better black levels? Or due to segmented backlighting? Or due to limits in the lossy coding?) Perhaps you were watching in a brightly lit room where ambient light "drowned" the darker tones of the display?
UHD will bring with it "HDR". HDR (in this context) means that we will finally have a means of signaling from content producer to the home that some pixels will be really bright (i.e. the sun). Instead of clipping highlights or tonemapping, we'll get a larger continous dynamic range (if and to what degree this will actually be used by content producers and bitrate-starved distributors and competitive tv manufacturers is another question). To be able to do transitions within the range, more than 8 bits will be available.
Incidentally, this system is not supposed to give brighter overall pictures. That would mean increasing the power consumption, something that the EU and others are not to keen on. The average brightness will somehow be limited (perhaps by max total power draw/heat produced in OLED tvs). But the content should be able to work within those limits to do more realistic specular highlights while doing deeper shadows, all with smooth tonality. I can't wait for this to happen.
-h