Steve Yedlin’s 8-Bit PQ Deception

“So, everything right now is 10-bit or higher going to the monitors. And both of these look totally smooth. But what I’m gonna do now is, I’m gonna chunk it to 8-bit. And you see how bad that is? That’s the HDR… I mean, it’s actually terrible. We’ve lost the illusion of a smooth gradient and you can very clearly see the individual increments—the smallest steps that can be made when it’s 8-bit. So, the SDR is totally smooth at 8-bit, and the HDR isn’t. You should be able to see how much more efficient SDR is at using the bit depth than HDR. When they say it’s 10-bit, they mean ‘it NEEDS 10 bits’ [snickering]. It’s a data hog, is what it means. So that means at ANY data rate, the SDR curve is gonna be better.” Steve Yedlin, ASC

In “Debunking HDR,” Steve Yedlin reduces an HDR signal to 8-bit precision, creates severe banding, then declares this proves HDR is a “data hog” that is inherently worse than SDR.

Why the experiment is invalid (in 2 Acts)

ACT 1: ITU-R BT.2100 explicitly specifies the use of 10-bit or 12-bit precision. This is non-negotiable. The PQ EOTF was designed to use these 1024 or 4096 code values to avoid banding.

ACT 2: Yedlin deliberately cripples PQ while testing BT.1886 in its native SDR range (0.1–100 cd/m²)—like forcing BT.1886 to 4-bit, then saying gamma is “broken.” 8-bit’s only got 256 values, practically guaranteeing banding in gradients.

His conclusion is an inversion of reality. Yedlin condemns PQ as a “data hog,” but ITU-R BT.2390 proves that BT.1886 would need >12-bits for HDR to avoid banding (Fig 13: “rises substantially above the visual threshold“). PQ delivers artifact-free HDR at 10/12-bits.