These numbers may surprise you

Many decried SMPTE’s revision calling for a 5-nit surround as being too stringent, while Charles Poynton maintained the new standard was too lax.

“SMPTE ST 2080-3 calls for a surround luminance of 5 nt (that is, 5% of the 100 nit reference white luminance of ST 2080-1). ST 2080-3’s Annex A provides a highly questionable methodology for establishing the 5 nt value; there is no mention of the standards group taking any measurements. In 2010, I visited four Blu-ray mastering studios (three in Los Angeles and one in New York), and I measured surround values averaging about 1 nt. It was an explicit criterion during the development of the BT.1886 EOTF for HD to codify existing practice; to do otherwise would ‘break the vault’ in the sense that archived material taken out of the vault and displayed in BT.1886 would change in appearance compared to the appearance of the material at the time it was put into the vault. Evidently, no such consideration was applied to the development of SMPTE ST 2080-3. I urge ignoring the 5 nt surround provision of SMPTE ST 2080-3.”

– Charles Poynton, Color Appearance Issues in Digital Video, HD/UHD and D-Cinema, 2018

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