Are you sure that wasn't an ad for Imax?

What a shame that the voice-over is absoluty rubbish. It sounds more like a the trailer of a cheap new sci-fi movie than someone trying to communicate a vision with a passion.

BUWAHHAHAHA! using YouTube to show HIDef!!! oh the stupidity!

I do really like ultrablacks. That said, motion picture film has very lifted blacks.

The current display technology has already surpassed the black levels available from film. It's video and telvision that get the ultrarich blacks.

Film people getting behind this is pure marketing.

Techguy-do you know how video and television get better blacks than film? I would think that they would all use basically the same medium for initial capture? Are the film studios doing something post production to "lift" their blacks? Is there a particular reason you know of that they would want to?

And on a separate note this is all a numbers game that they play anyway. They want to be able to throw out ridiculous contrast ratios when very few people even realize what that means. Sure people might understand that it's the difference between the lightest lights and the darkest darks, but very few realize that a company who wants a higher contrast ratio to put on the side of the box will merely turn up the backlight during testing. Don't worry that Joe Consumer will NEVER want anything that bright in his living room let alone on a computer monitor. So if your max brightness is 1000 and your black point is .5 you have a 2000 to 1 contrast ration. Average monitor brightness that is comfortable? About 200 I think. So what if you want a 4000 to 1 contrast ration? Well, you either have to lower the black point to .25 (the tough part) or get a brightness of 2000. "Shee-yoot, just turn that there lamp up a couple of notches and we can put a bigger number on our box!"

Pioneer is actually tackling the "hard" part of the equation with this, giving you deeper blacks, instead of just getting a brighter light (that will later be turned down anyway.) Kudos to Pioneer. (Or should I say "Kuros"?)

One thing I would actually like to see Gizmodo do (you ARE the gadget blog right?) is give the actual brightness level and black points when they throw out these big contrast ratios. Personally if a monitor has a contrast ratio of 10K to 1 but it's black point is .8 I could care less because everything is just going to be washed out by that horrendous backlight spitting out 8K lumens.

Television and film use very different inital capture devices.

Film typically uses film for capturethen scans that film into compters. At the capture level flim has an increadiable amount of information. At this point there is far more dynamic range on film than video . The issues is that the film is then printed. Print film ,what you see projected, has all of the special effects and edits in it. This print film is then put on a device called a telecine, that scans the film and converst it from 24fps to a tv friendly 59.95 / 60 fps material.

The print of a film is very much part of the artistic presentation and the final film 'look' can be altered by using different distribution stocks and amounts of film dye, printing density.

Televsion uses video camera,very good ones that have less data than a film scan.The blacks are artifically created to hide any 'black noise'.Also the contrast can be adjusted to give you the deep blacks you expect.

To contrast the film print has a about 2600:1 sequential contrast, before projection. After projection it has a 1200:1 contrast ratio.

Does this help out?

The voice-over for the 2nd video sounds like Stephen Hawking switched his voice box to "suave."

Techguy-excellent information. Thank you. Does this mean that we're all in for a world of "contrast hurt" as film makers go more and more digital?