What is 4K?

High Dynamic Range

You’re probably wondering, what is 4K TV? What most people don’t know, is that when films are made they shoot with specific levels of colour and brightness that as viewers, we never get to experience.

Not any more. 4K TVs are equipped with High Dynamic Range (HDR) which delivers content to you, how it was originally captured. HDR requires an HDR-compatible 4K TV, as well as HDR mastered content. When in use, HDR significantly expands the range of contrast and colour available to your TV, offering truly stunning picture quality not available on standard video signals.

There are four different kinds of HDR. HDR10, HRD10+, Dolby Vision and HLG. Let’s take a closer look.

Most 4K TVs on the market today will have HDR10 with colour sub-sampling and 10-bit depth. This means, compared to standard definition, the image is twice as bright. You will also experience the whitest whites and blackest blacks. An image on HDR10 will have approximately one billion different colour shades, while standard definition only has 16 million.

HDR10+ is like taking all the best parts of HDR10 and turning up the volume. The brightness is increased on each frame and each piece of content is treated with its own set of colours, brightness, and contrast to deliver the most realistic looking picture.

Dolby Vision is the new kid in town. Created by the same company that developed Dolby Digital and Dolby Atmos it improves on HDR10+ by using impressive non-static metadata to give each frame it’s very own HDR treatment. It adding 10,000 nits of brightness and a total of 68 billion colours.

HLG or (Hybrid Log Gamma) was created to solve a compatibility problem. This technology allows standard HD to ‘reinterpret’ what it is seeing and improve on that. So even if you are watching broadcast content that wasn’t made using similar equipment to HDR, the HLG technology will reconfigure that content, and send it to you in a clearer, brighter picture. Clever, huh?

OLED

Unlike LED TVs, OLED TVs do not utilise a backlight at all. Instead, each pixel (referred to as an organic light-emitting diode) is self-illuminating and can turn on or off depending on the scene.

What does this mean for you, the viewer? Well, 4K TVs with OLED can deliver unbelievably dark blacks for deeper contrasts, when the organic light-emitting diodes turn off, That’s because the backlight of your standard LED panel can shine through and wash out darker scenes. Not only will your 4K TV with OLED deliver lifelike colours and stunning contrasts, but it can do all this with an incredibly slim and light design that it is no wider than the average pencil.

QLED

The introduction of 4K resolution brought with it the future of TV panels currently available on 4K and 8K TVs. QLED TVs are a 4K TV that uses nanoparticles called quantum dots.

These quantum dots work to enhance and supercharge the colour and brightness of the picture quality when the TV LED backlight shines through to the screen.

These quantum dots offer a better way of delivering colour to your screen. Instead of using a combination of white LEDs with colour filters laid over, the quantum dots can produce more heavily saturated primary colours and even better contrasts – including brighter whites that LED can ever produce.