Short Takes: Is 1,000 Nits Enough?

Bram Desmet, CEO, Flanders Scientific, responds,

“1,000 nits was enough because it’s all we could do. The Dolby Pulsar was really the only display out there that people could really get their hands on that could reliably do over 1,000 nits well. The issue being, you couldn’t even buy that, it was basically a lease-only type of option; there weren’t that many out there. People are often surprised at how few of those actually exist. So, I think that that became a kind of de facto standard just because there was nothing else available. Now, a lot of people are happy with 1,000 nits. The Netflixes of the world are asking primarily for 1,000 nits as your baseline standard: that’s what they would like. But what a lot of these companies are doing, especially the streaming players like Apple and Netflix, is, they are accepting deliverables that are mastered at over 1,000 nits, and in some original content cases with some of these companies, they are specifically asking for masters that are at 3,000 or 4,000, or sometimes down to 2,000 nits. So, you are seeing this growing trend of wanting to do this, and the reason these companies are doing it is because, on the consumer landscape, being able to market yet another number, or another competitive advantage, is going to become very attractive to the consumer television manufacturers. So, they’re going to say, ‘Well, our TV’s 2X or 3X or 4X brighter’ – you’ve already seen that some of these consumer TVs are getting up to 2,000 nits or more – and that trend is only going to continue. And the content providers out there are aware of this and want their content to be able to shine on these TVs. So, 1,000 nits has been enough for now, but there are a lot of people who are taking this kind of growing trend for requesting deliverables over a 1,000 nits into account when they’re buying monitors. So, they may not need over 1,000 nits today, but they look at something like the XM310K and go, ‘Okay, well, this makes me a lot more future proof because I can go 3X brighter if I need to’. So yeah, it’s a tough question to answer. We always tell people, you know it has largely been enough, and for almost all these companies, they’re not going to reject your your content [just] because you’re only able to master [at] 1,000 nits, at least [not] currently; but there are these growing number of exceptions [where] they’re like, ‘Hey, this would be great if we could get a 2,000 or a 4,000 nit master of this.’”

In a more recent interview on Mixing Light, he adds,

“Where possible, we’ve gone that extra step and built very customized solutions to try to push the industry forward. We’re not going to tell you that everybody needs a 5,000 nit monitor. We know that it’s not something we expect to do in high volume, but if we don’t push beyond 1,000 nits, what we see is that we’re all getting a little too comfortable with saying 1,000 nits is good enough. We know that’s what a lot of people require for deliverables, but there is real value if you compare a 5,000 nit monitor next to a 1,000 nit monitor in exploring those higher luminance levels because the impact is very real, it’s something you can see with your own eyes and it is a compelling thing when you see it in person.”