Hitachi Kokusai to Showcase HDR Expertise at 2017 NAB Show
Broad support for emerging standards and benefits of HD-HDR in non-UHD workflows will be highlighted at booth and in conference presentations
Woodbury, NY, March 16, 2017 — Hitachi Kokusai Electric America Ltd. (Hitachi Kokusai) will highlight its continuing leadership in High Dynamic Range (HDR) video acquisition at the upcoming 2017 NAB Show, taking place April 24-27 in Las Vegas. HDR-enabled HITACHI cameras will be featured in the Hitachi Kokusai booth, number C4309, while conference presentations will provide attendees with an insightful look at emerging HDR technologies and applications.
One of the first implementers and proponents of the benefits of High Dynamic Range technologies, Hitachi Kokusai offers HDR support across its extensive range of MOS and CMOS-based HDTV, 4K and 8K cameras. At the NAB Show, the company will emphasize how the use of HDR in high-definition acquisition enables visibly superior HD productions with increased contrast and richer colors, but without the higher infrastructure costs, processing overhead and bandwidth requirements of Ultra HD.
“While HDR is most commonly mentioned alongside Ultra HD, high-definition video can also benefit from dramatic improvements that enable life-like imagery with HDR,” said John J. Humphrey, Vice President of Business Development, Hitachi Kokusai Electric America Ltd. “While UHD delivers more pixels, HDR provides ‘better’ pixels – more detail in the blacks, expanded mid-tones with brighter highlights, and more saturated colors – independent of resolution.
“In fact, at the typical viewing distance between consumers and their television displays, HDR is much more noticeable than increased resolution,” he continued. “Our implementation of HD-HDR in our HDTV cameras enables content producers and distributors to cost-effectively realize these benefits without a major overhaul of their existing workflows and infrastructure.”
Almost any distribution architecture that can deliver HDR for Ultra HD can also do so for HD-HDR, including cable, satellite and OTT services; private video networks such as in-venue displays and theatrical presentation; and soon broadcasters with the forthcoming adoption of ATSC 3.0. Similarly, HDR-capable Ultra HD viewing devices can also display HD-HDR while upconverting the high definition signal to 4K resolution, and HDR specifications such as Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) are backwards-compatible with the legacy standard dynamic range (SDR) TVs still prevalent in homes. HITACHI cameras – including the recently-announced Z-HD5500 1080p studio and field production camera – support HDR variants including HLG and HPQ, which is compatible with the HDR10 open standard for consumer TVs.
Humphrey will explore these concepts and other key aspects of HDR during his NAB Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference presentation “Emerging Technologies and Standards for High Dynamic Range”, from 9:00-9:30am PDT Tuesday, April 25 in room N260 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Featuring highlights from Humphrey’s white paper “High Dynamic Range for HDTV”, the session will also look at the multiple available HDR standards, and discuss the relationship between HDR, camera sensor implementations and human visual perception.
Humphrey will also share Hitachi Kokusai’s HDR expertise while covering similar topics at the 2017 PBS Technology Conference preceding the NAB Show. The hour-long session will start at 11:00am PDT on Friday, April 21 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.