A study where participants watched video content on an HDR display under various ambient lighting conditions and asked to complete questionnaires to document their observations and subjective preferences as well as any visual fatigue they might have experienced found that subjects reported experiencing little to no visual fatigue.
Test Setup
Researchers used a Dolby 37” prototype HDR display with an LCD panel and LED backlight whose peak luminance was 4,000 cd/m2. Subjects in the study were seated at a viewing distance of around 3X PH.
Findings
Ouestionnaires revealed that viewers experienced surprisingly little visual fatigue even after relatively lengthy (1.5 hour) movie sessions. More than 1/2 of participants selected 0 (“none”) for all symptoms, and over 95% of individual responses, including those of the older participants, indicated 0. Of the remaining responses where subjects indicated more than 0 visual fatigue, the average level was 1.18 out of 10.0. The total reported level of visual fatigue across all questions was 0.0325 out of 10.0.
The researchers noted that their results “matche[d] the observation by Seetzen et al. [2006] that perceived image quality increases with higher display peak luminance, as long as the contrast ratio is sufficiently high. In our experiment, all subjects maximized the contrast and most selected a brightness significantly higher than what is possible on conventional displays. Seetzen et al. had high dynamic range still-image content. We can postulate that subjects in our study might have selected even higher luminance levels if the study had used true HDR content rather than adjusted LDR footage.”
Video Viewing Preferences for HDR Displays Under Varying Ambient Illumination, Allan G. Rempel, Wolfgang Heidrich, Hiroe Li, Rafał Mantiuk, 1) The University of British Columbia, 2) Dolby Canada
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