Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Judging displays just got clearer!”.
You know shout out vasa for actually making monitor specs easier to understand. I think there’s still a lot more work for them to do here, but having vasa display hdr certification has made it so much easier, not just to not just to test a monitor, because we have the equipment to test the peak brightness of a display, for example. So we could tell you guys: hey the hdr. Experience of this is not going to be great, because here’s, the total possible contrast ratio and here’s.
Why that’s a problem? It really doesn’t get dark enough. It really doesn’t get bright enough, so the hdr metadata yeah sure it can be interpreted by the by the display. It’S not going to it’s not going to break the chain of correctly interpreting the metadata that accompanies your your video file, but it’s not really. The the dynamic range is not really that high right, but vasa makes it simple by having these, and actually, i was initially opposed to them, having even vasa hdr, 400 and 600 in particular. Those two are they’re, not it’s not it’s internally.
We call them hdr because they’re they’re not um, and i was opposed to that, because what i felt like was that it was an easy way for manufacturers to market their display as hdr when it really wasn’t capable of it. But i’ve kind of come around on it, because the the sort of unintended ironic consequence of them creating that hdr, 400 and hdr 600 branding is that folks, like us, can quickly and easily look at a monitor and go hey. You got the wrong certification. You suck and it and it’s and it’s an easy thing for people to understand like if i tell you guys, if you see something that is hdr 400 certified, it is undeniably unmistakably a bad hdr experience by all means.
You know still consider the product, just not if you’re expecting to game or watch movies in hdr and have it really pop. As for hdr 600. Well, you know what that actually covers a pretty broad range, because i don’t believe there’s anything between 600 and a thousand. So some vasa display hdr 600 certified monitors can actually be pretty dece, but at the bottom end they’re, not that great and then vasa display hdr1000.
We know that those are going to be pretty strong and then there’s there’s one. That’S above that just like. Yes, very, very hdr um, so you know just shout out because monitor manufacturers are notorious for publishing utterly meaningless specification sheets i mean, do you remember, do you remember back in the day right mid-2000s? You know going back to when i was product managing at ncix, mid to late 2000s. You’D see monitors okay, that had advertised advertised uh, pixel response times of you know five milliseconds or or like like, like single digit milliseconds right, and you could look at them and almost watch the seconds tick by on your clock, while a pixel switches from white to Black and back again like it was ridiculous.
It was just clearly not right yeah or they would achieve that under very specific conditions that produced horrible horrible ghosting. Artifacts. Excuse me well motion blur uh artifacts. When you are no sorry um overdrive.
Sorry, excuse me uh overdrive, artifacts, where you would have not only would because the pixels are slow. Not only would you have a trail behind the object, but you would actually have a ghost out in front of the object as it tries to to drive those pixels ahead of time. It’S like nobody would play like that. It looks.
It looks horrendous right, refresh rate on tvs was always a frustrating thing too. Oh, oh refresh, yeah, remember 960 hertz refresh rates on tvs that could only do 60.. Yeah! Stop it literally just worse, but uh companies seem happy about this as well. Oh, we haven’t even said what it is yet, oh so so in vasa’s, next move they’ve created clear, mr a certification that will replace response time.
Grading. So, just a little bit of background response time would be the time that it takes for a pixel to change from one state to another there’s different response times. Some of them require them to go to and then back and some of them are gray to gray or black to white like there are different states.
There are different um, some more and some less challenging ways to measure it um. But this clear, mr certification, is hopefully going to put that particular bit of marketing nonsense to rest. Okay! Go ahead! Sorry about that! Oh! I was uh, actually just looking up what blurbusters thinks about this, but i didn’t find it yet, but anyways walk through it. If you want the uh yeah go for it, i’ll keep looking it up all right, so basically, it’s a compliant test specification that applies to both lcd and emissive display products, so that would be oled would be the most common one of those and cmr is the Clear motion ratio: this is intended to be a clear numerical value based on the ratio of clear pixels to blurry pixels. They um wow.
That’S that’s! Actually, oh wow. That’S a really interesting way of doing it! Sorry, i’m just looking at this now uh. They say that motion picture response time and greater grey metrics fail to reflect the true nature of blur, because a solely time-based metric can’t account for image enhancement and blur mitigation techniques like overshoot and undershoot. The clearmar standard and logo program limits the use of the these enhancement techniques during testing, which is good because a lot of the time you can tune something like overdrive to achieve a really good measurement in a synthetic test. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s actually a good experience for the viewer. There are grading, slash rating tiers based on the ratio of clear to blurry pixels as a percentage.
Oh okay, so clear, mr 7000 would be 65 to 75 times more clear pixels than blurry pixels, for example. So each tier provides a visually distinguishable change in clarity, so the bigger the number the more better and the range is from clearmar 3000 to clearmark 9000. I guess we can’t be over 9 000. as luke.
Sorry as luke was saying before uh samsung display and lg electronics seem pleased with this change. Um. Here’S a statement from samsung. We applaud vasa’s global standardization of the clear motion ratio ratio metric in clear. Mr a specification for blur free viewing that we fully support and to which we have already certified our newest oled display. I i love that they’re focused on oled.
Yet how funny that the oled manufacturers are the ones that are like yeah now, everyone can know how much better we are uh and then lg said they will continue to collaborate with visa to ensure that their monitors not only meet the high standards demanded by basis Performance tests, but are also well equipped to satisfy the expectations and diverse needs of today’s consumers. So it sounds like uh hardware unboxed, which they they do a lot of really fantastic monitoring. They really do and and blurbusters are a little uncertain about this whole thing. Um there’s some some funky stuff uh, there’s a there’s, a twitter thread that i found with both of them discussing it actually, which is which is very interesting uh.
You can throw my screen every once in a while. Something good happens on twitter yeah, it’s rare uh, but it does. It does happen. Um hard to unbox is talking about how vasa’s new clear mr display certification is ranking. 138 hertz oled panels and 165 hertz lcd panels in the same clarity, tier um. Apparently it was deemed unfair that one has like some tech behind it. The hardware inbox said vasa. This is an interesting little visa, let’s test clarity and blur also vasa, but let’s disable all the blur reduction and clarity improving features.
So that’s a little weird, because i i don’t personally like that, because why would you turn those features off if you were a consumer? I think that it’s okay but then yeah companies can also potentially cheat it’s a double-edged sword, yes yeah, because if it’s a feature that harms the viewing experience in some other way like, let’s say hypothetically, it reduced the overall color depth, sure or something like that. Yeah then, we would not recommend that you use it right or if it turned off some kind of um. Oh man, i mean yeah i’d say affecting color would be one of the one of the biggest concerns that i would have brightness yeah yeah brightness would be another big one like if you had a a feature like um like backlight strobing. That was designed to enhance the uh, the the clarity of the image but, like you said, came at a significant brightness cost.
Then i would say that almost you need to test that display under both conditions, yeah and it’s without features yeah native well, it’s kind of, like you know, native versus dynamic contrast ratios you’d almost have to have both numbers reported with. That said, i mean, for my part, i would rather just buy the superior panel in the first place. Without you know some kind of of backlight strobing technology.
If i don’t need it, but then if you do develop a workaround that works really well well, then that sucks and that’s that’s pretty unfair yeah yeah, i don’t. I don’t necessarily have the right answer here: um i’m going to just on a personal level, i’m going to keep my eye on hardware and boxed and blurbusters and see what they think moving forward um but yeah, interesting, interesting, interesting, interesting, anytime. Specific companies in a space are extremely happy about a new standard coming out um or a new certification coming out.
Sorry it can be cool or not cool and it’s it’s a little tough to tough to tell unless you’re really on the ground floor, it’s probably better than nothing, which is what we’ve had up until now. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be room for improvement and vasa has made changes to their certifications in the past. So i hope they’ll take all the feedback that they get and continue to improve this.
In the meantime, here’s how they’re testing so they’re using a digital, high speed camera, which takes pictures of a test pattern moving across the screen as it changes from from one frame to the next. A colorimeter will verify pattern. Luminance and products will be tested at ambient room temperature native resolution maximum refresh rate, so here’s something that gets kind of complicated handling variable refresh rate motion can be very challenging and that’s something clearly. This test will not address default, power-up configuration and all after warming up there will be no backlight strobing and limits will be placed on overshoot and undershoot uh. Okay, then the resistance, so my initial take better than nothing but clearly not a replacement for independent reviews. Some flaws, yeah yeah, but that’s i mean we’ve always pushed that forward right, more stuff, more, better, well, info, more better.
The thing is: that’s why we’ve never we’ve never really boiled products down to a score. You know that’s something that i’ve that i’ve been opposed to. I mean, i think, pretty much since we started right, there’s i i know there was at least one time because i really scored a surprise.
I think it was like a razer laptop and it was like when we were still at the ncx studio or something it was forever ago. I think i gave yeah we’ve always editor’s choice award or something that was that, but i don’t do it not a point. Scorer yeah, i don’t do awards and i don’t do scores yeah, because the reality of it is. If you really want to know about the product, you need to know the pros and the cons.
It is always more nuanced than just eight out of ten six out of ten six. What’S what are they? Why do i want ten of them? You know what i mean. .