LAS VEGAS (AP) – For years, TV makers have focused on making pictures sharper by squeezing more pixels onto screens. Now, their attention is shifting to improving the way sets display color, with a newish technology called HDR taking center stage.
HDR, or high dynamic range, promises brighter whites, darker blacks, and a richer range of colors – at least when you’re watching the few select movie titles that get released in the format. Trouble is, there aren’t all that many of those yet, and other HDR viewing options are likely to remain scarce for the immediate future.
Even worse, there are likely to be several different flavors of HDR, just to keep TV buyers on their toes.
HDR represents the latest effort by the world’s television makers to goose demand for new sets. Global television shipments are expected to flatline this year, says research firm IHS – and that’s an improvement over 2015, when shipments fell 4 percent.
TV makers are still touting the previous new new thing – 4K, or ultra high-definition, sets, which have four times the pixels of current high-definition screens. While 4K has stopped the bleeding, it hasn’t jolted the TV industry back to life, not least because such high resolution only makes sense if you sit up close and get a very large screen. (See our interactive guide to figuring whether 4K makes sense for you: http://bit.ly/1NnD49i .)