Stacey Spears and Don Munsil, creators of the Spears & Munsil High Definition Benchmark series, have announced the release of the Spears & Munsil UHD HDR Benchmark. The Spears & Munsil UHD HDR Benchmark adds even more features and patterns, and brings Spears & Munsil’s precision and attention to detail to the calibration and evaluation of UHD displays.
The Spears & Munsil UHD HDR Benchmark gives professionals and amateurs alike access to a wealth of test and demonstration materials to tell them what their displays are doing, identify weak links in their hardware and software, and dial in the optimal settings not only for their equipment, but for future equipment that hasn’t even been designed yet.
“Every pattern has been rethought with High Dynamic Range and UltraHD in mind,” says co-creator Stacey Spears. “We believe this disc completely changes the game for test and evaluation discs by making use of all of the features and range that HDR and wide-gamut standards can offer.” Almost every pattern is encoded in multiple versions, with metadata and peak levels adjusted for a wide variety of HDR display technologies.
Like the previous discs, the Spears & Munsil UHD HDR Benchmark uses patterns created from scratch using Spears & Munsil’s own in-house software. “There really isn’t any other way to make patterns that we can stand behind,” says co-creator Don Munsil. “We build every pattern using our own tools, written from scratch in C++. If a pattern needs to be generated directly in a very specific color space and data format, we generate it in that color space and format; we’re not limited to what you can do with off-the-shelf graphics software. In a few cases we’ve had to create our own format, because no existing file format could represent the pattern we needed to create.”
The disc includes new editions of some favorite patterns from the earlier editions, plus many new patterns exclusive to Spears & Munsil. “We’ve created the very best single pattern for evaluating which color space to output from your UHD player or set-top box,” says Spears. “The problems of artifacts caused by color conversion and video processing remain as relevant as ever for HDR and UHD, but HDR adds exciting new problems to all the old ones. We rebuilt the color-space evaluation pattern from scratch, and put in one place everything an end-user or professional evaluator needs. Every pattern we make goes through that same process, and is refined again and again to make it clearer, simpler, and more precise.”
Like with the previous editions, the S&M UHD HDR Benchmark contains patterns suitable for the professional calibrator or serious amateur who wants a complete suite of test patterns usable with spectroradiometers and colorimeters. “These patterns are tested by real industry professionals, multiple times over multiple iterations, before we put them on the disc,” says Spears. “These are the same patterns used regularly by the same people who produce your displays, players, and movie content.”
The Spears & Munsil UHD HDR Benchmark is available from Amazon.com at a n MSRP of $39.95.
For more information, visit www.spearsandmunsil.com.
