Deep Colour/xvYCC colour/x.v.colour confused consumer

[ArthurDaley]

I bought the Sony camcorder HDR-HC7 (1080i/HDV). It has x.v.colour support so I have been recording with that enabled.

I wanted an HD display to support this extra wide colour space and held off on buying the Samsung LE40F71BX and now because the new Samsung LE40M87 supports "Deep Colour" I bought it.

I struggled to ascertain if you needed a 5gbps or 10.2gbps cable for x.v.colour. I concluded 70% that you need 10.2. I then struggled to find a cable that said HDMI 1.3 certified, believing that would ensure 10.2gbps.

Now I've got the cable, the camcorder and the display. It is at this point that I read here http://www.hdmi.org/learningcenter/hdmi_1_3_faq.asp#q3

Q: What is meant by the term “Deep Color™” and why is it important?
Deep Color™ lets HDTVs and other displays go from millions of colors to billions of colors allowing consumers to enjoy unprecedented vividness and accuracy of color on their displays. Deep Color™ eliminates on-screen color banding, for smooth tonal transitions and subtle gradations between colors. It enables increased contrast ratio, and can represent many times more shades of gray between black and white.
Q: What is “xvYCC”?
HDMI 1.3 adopts use of the IEC 61966-2-4 color standard, commonly called xvYCC (shorthand for Extended YCC Colorimetry for Video Applications). This new standard can support 1.8 times as many colors as existing HDTV signals. xvYCC lets HDTVs display colors more accurately, enabling displays with more natural, vivid colors .
Q: What is the difference between “Deep Color™” and “xvYCC?”
Deep Color™ increases the number of available colors within the boundaries defined by the RGB or YCbCr color space, while xvYCC expands the available range (limits) to allow the display of colors that meet and exceed what human eyes can recognize.

Now I don't have a clue in hell if I will have a wider colour experience. Can anybody care to enlighten me?

[BJ_M]

it is just a marketing term in all reality -- nothing that has it looks any better or worse than a panel without it

why?


because no consumer content source has it anyway .. unless you have access to 10bit colour source files -- which most people dont - and dont play through any device with hdmi out anyway

[ArthurDaley]

But my camcorder has xvYCC colour and I play it via HDMI 1.3!

[BJ_M]

but the storage for your camera does not -- so how is it doing it ?

faking it as far as i can tell -- even the CCD's it has are only 8 bit i think ..

btw -- film (as in movie) has even less colour , in fact it is in the range of "100,000's" - not even millions ...

[edDV]

HDV is 25Mb/s 8 bit MPeg2 compressed 4:2:0 color space.

Maybe they are using some kind of look up table to fake wider color space but I wish they would just leave it alone for the HC7.

When I get the chance, I'll be looking at color match of the HC7 (and Canon HD20) to Sony HDR-FX1 or Z1. I'll buy the one that matches best since I want to cut them together.

[ArthurDaley]

Maybe they are using some kind of look up table to fake wider color space but I wish they would just leave it alone for the HC7.

you can enable/disable x.v.colour in the HD-7 menu. It is disabled by default.

[edDV]

Maybe they are using some kind of look up table to fake wider color space but I wish they would just leave it alone for the HC7.

you can enable/disable x.v.colour in the HD-7 menu. It is disabled by default.

Ahh good because the report on the first release Japanese model said that it defaulted to x.v.colour every time you turned it on.

[Cornucopia]

My guess is that unless the cam is storing the LUT in AUX DATA fields of the MPEG stream, it CAN'T store true extended colorspace (let alone higher color bit depth). To get ANYTHING enhanced at all out of this, you'd have to output live via HDSDI or something similar.

DeepColor sounds like a cute marketing word for higher depth than 8bit-per-colorprimary.
x.v.blahblahblah sounds like a cute psuedoscientific term for expanded colorspace (closer to LAB than to RGB/YCC/CMYK).

This is an area that isn't really ready for consumer (or even prosumer) prime time. Even film DI houses ($$$$) don't often have extended displays.

Scott

BTW, just going to 4:4:4 is usually a big enough bump up in quality to satisfy picky color-watchers--like the Andromeda mod for DV cams. That is SOMETHING!

[edDV]

It can only make things worse for typical consumer sources. Until Sony produces non- standard BluRay HD movies, there isn't any source for playback. So far as I know, none of the BluRay encoders or players support expanded color space.

This can be important for scientific applications, photography and movie theater projection but is way too early for TV.

The 4:4:4 trend started in the late 80's and became important for post houses matching product colors for ad production. Pantone established a table for Pantone chip color to 8bit and later 10 bit 4:4:4 video color spaces. Getting the colors to match through 4:2:2, NTSC or PAL conversions required some manual filtering but the 4:4:4 version looked good and provided a match reference.

http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/pantone.aspx?ca=25

[BJ_M]

i'm still waiting for sony to drop their non standard memory cards, which most of which are not backwards compatible and now even sony dropped putting mem stick inputs on their flat panel displays !!!

which seems like a dumb marketing move on their part -- to view sony camera photos on a sony monitor -> forget it ...

the SD card slots on panasonic (and others) plasmas are quite handy

[edDV]

Sony always attempts non standard gimmicks that force customers into buying their full line. I reject fly in the pan non-standard marketing strategy. They should get some white papers out there to convince an application segment that this is a good thing.

I prefer Apple's strategy to spot standards trends, pick the best, then rename/trademark it and claim it as their own.

Sony just mucks up the playing field.