Sony PS3 will be the first device to utilise newly-approved HDMI 1.3

What exactly is a HDR display? I thought the whole point of HDR was to compensate for low-range displays. So if you have a high-range display, there would be no need for it to be dynamic. Or would the HDR display accept a high-range signal through HDMI 1.3 and then perform the tone-mapping on its end? I don't see the point of that.

 

No, the point of HDR is to allow for more "correct" rendering. You apply tone-mapping in order to display the HDR data on a normal display, but in doing so you are turning HDR into non-HDR before it goes near the display.

So an HDR display would naturally be able to display/handle a greater range of luminance (with precision), though possibly not enough to warrant ditching the tone-mapping entirely (perhaps it would move to the display, however).

 

Well maybe I'm misunderstanding then. I thought HDR was the process of taking a high precision rendering and dynamically tone-mapping it to a lower precision. If that's not true, what exactly does the "dynamic" part of HDR mean?

 

No, HDR doesn't need tone mapping. HDR literally is High Dynamic Range, which is the range of intensities it can cover. Normal graphics can span 0-255 per colour, and your standard TV can resolve 0-255 intensities per channel. HDR can span 0-100,000 and more. Tone Mapping is about taking an image with intensities as varied as that and scaling the intensities to map onto a 0-255 range. So if you have a birghtly lit courtyard scene, with shadows at intensity 200, sandy floor at 8000, and sunlit white walls at intensity 100,000, you'd take those input and map them to 0, 128 and 255 outputs accordlingly.

An HDR display could both take the HDR signal and display it in the normal range, tone mapping as needed, while working in Floating Point space for higher quality, or take an HDR signal and show output intensities that more closely match the input, so you're shadows and white walls really are as dark or bright as they would be in real life (or something similar but scaled down as needed)