The 8K Association, the cross-industry group dedicated to promoting the growth of the 8K ecosystem, has updated the performance specification of its Association Certified mark program.
Included are new decoding requirements, new image quality metrics and a game mode.
The organisation has also added a number of new members including Prime Video, content creation company 4by4, testing service provider UL and TV maker Changhong.
“Prime Video was the first subscription service to launch HDR back in 2015, and we are obsessed with providing our customers high audiovisual quality, noted Ben Waggoner, Principal Video Specialist at Amazon. “We want to team up with the 8KA in identifying if and what content benefits from delivery at native 8K and 4Kp120, and the technical requirements to deliver those benefits to customers.”
The 8KA has already Certified over 80 TV models to date. In addition to the existing requirements for resolution, luminance, colour and connectivity standards that ensure powerful big-screen performance, the 8K Association Certified logo program now recognizes a broader set of video decoding standards that will promote the wider availability of 8K streaming content.
The 8K Association is also pioneering the use of Ambient Contrast Ratio (ACR) as a new way to help ensure good picture quality performance in different ambient lighting conditions. For example, when the room is dark the TV will deliver the brightest colours and widest contrast. But as the ambient illumination increases, both of these picture quality elements diminish. This can be overcome with brighter TVs and TV screen technology with lower reflectance. The 8KA ACR test measures the reflectivity of the TV with a test pattern in both bright and dim illumination conditions and sets levels for performance in each case that the TV must pass. ACR is an important factor for TVs from the users’ perspective, regardless of resolution.
“We have been discussing ACR more than a year as a new item and it was finally included in V2.1.0”, noted KG Lee, Chair of the Technology Work Group. “While passing the ACR spec is optional now for certification, members are required to provide the data so we can optimize the pass/fail criteria for a future mandatory requirement.”
Also included in the revised specification are new Gaming mode requirements that include support for Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM) and Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) via the HDMI 2.1 interface. Gaming on 8K TVs is expected to be an important use case so the 8K Association wants to help ensure the best performance.